Az ens morale és az erkölcsi közösség alapjai a korai és a kései felvilágosodásban. Széljegyzetek Körmöczi János jegyzeteihez
The ens morale (Moral Being) and the Foundations of the Moral Community in the Enlightenment – Marginal Notes to János Körmöczi

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the fundamental distinction that Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) drew in the late seventeenth century between conceptual knowledge on the one hand and inner sensation (or conscience) on the other. Instead of going into the details of Malebranche’s curious system of philosophy, the real aim of the author is to use this distinction to give a general survey of two important tenets of the late Enlightenment period, whose impact can be seen even in the works of János Körmöczi. In the first section, the paper provides an account of Malebranche’s concept of ideas as eternal objects of knowledge which reside in the mind of God. Malebranche holds that all types of human knowledge, theoretical and practical alike, depend on divine ideas which, with the participation of the individual, provide the foundations of a moral society based on right reason. In the second section, it turns to the second horn of the distinction, which concerns the problem of sensibility. Hereby it intends to show that sensibility, which, in contrast to the reason, remains a faculty of the individual soul, and reappears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) as the basis of religion. In the final section, it touches on a further topic that can be traced back to Malebranche and Leibniz, the relation between nature and grace or, more precisely, between the natural and the moral realms.

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