Birds, Frogs and Tintern Abbey: Humanism and Hubris

Abstract

David E. Cooper proposes that the ‘mystery’ of ‘reality as it “anyway” is, independently of human perspective’ provides measure for the leading of our lives and thus avoids, on the one hand, the hubris of a humanism for which moral life is the product of the human will and has no warrant beyond it, and, on the other, a theism which appears to be at once too remote from and too close to the human world to provide any such warrant. The paper rejects the role this gives to ‘mystery’ and locates ‘warrant’ in a moral perspective that is not the product of will.