The System of Being
"My dissertation aims to contribute to the large body of scholarship surrounding the works of Jonathan Edwards. It aims to piece together from his major works an account of his metaphysics which is comprehensive and systematic, and which, moreover, clears up a good deal of confusion surrounding his key ideas. It attends, first of all, to the one aspect of Edwards's thought that has been the most unduly neglected, namely, his theological ontology. Even when critics have acknowledged its importance, they have, for the most part, been reluctant to examine it at length. But because Edwards's conception of Being pervades, informs, and binds together all other aspects of his thought, this neglect has come at a cost. Taken by themselves, and without regard to the ontological substratum, the different aspects of Edwards's thought do not hold together; they are often misunderstood; and each has become an occasion for unending confusion and controversy. My dissertation begins, therefore, by describing Edwards's conception of Being. And from this conception, it derives the different aspects of his thought, which together constitute his system of Being. Having described these in broad outlines for the rest of the dissertation to fill in, the first chapter builds on the works of S. H. Lee to present an interpretation of Edwards's "dispositional ontology," whereby the essence of Being is held to consist in its substantive disposition. The second, third, and fourth chapters - "Knowledge," "Beauty," and "Virtue" - bring Edwards's ontology to bear cumulatively on his epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, and do so alongside related concepts of perfection, sin, fall, grace, and redemption. They explore some of his key ideas more thoroughly than critics have done so far, e.g., his understanding of the mind, its possibilities and limitations, and of the place and purpose of ethics in a deterministic universe. They also take a position on certain points of contention - e.g., the extent of Edwards's indebtedness to the Enlightenment - and help resolve certain conundrums - e.g., what Edwards means by the "sense of the heart"- that have long troubled the scholarship surrounding Edwards's works."--Pages vi-vii.