Common Good and Self-Interest in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy

Heikki Haara, is University Lecturer in Political history at the University of Helsinki. His primary research interest has been theories of human nature and their relationship to moral and political thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has been a visiting researcher at the universities of California, Berkeley and Oxford and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. He is the author of Pufendorf’s Theory of Sociability: Passions, Habits and Social Order (Springer, 2018) and the editor of Rights at the Margins: Historical, Philosophical and Legal Perspectives (Brill, 2020) and Passions, Politics and the Limits of Society (de Gruyter, 2020).  Juhana Toivanen is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published widely on medieval philosophical psychology, medieval conceptions of animals, and political philosophy. His major publications include the monographs Perception and the Internal Senses (Brill, 2013) and The Political Animal in Medieval Philosophy (Brill, 2021). In addition, he has published more than fifty journal articles and book chapters. Currently he is working on social and political dimensions of moral vices in late medieval philosophy, focusing mainly on commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics from ca. 1250–1600.

• Chapter 1. Introduction: On the Conflict between the Common Good and Individual Good (Juhana Toivanen and Heikki Haara).- Part I: Ancient and Medieval Philosophical and Theological Views.- Chapter 2. Honestum to Goodness(Calvin Normore).- Chapter 3. Interpreting Aristotle’s Concept of the Common Good(Anthony Celano).- Chapter 4. Medieval Monastic Ideas of the Compatibility between the Individual and the Common Good(Ritva Palmén).-Chapter 5. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas on Charity and the Common Good(Iacopo Costa).- Part II: "Common and Individual Good in Late Medieval Thought".- Chapter 6. Convergences of Private Self-Interest and the Common Good in Medieval Europe: An Overview of Economic Theories, c. 1150–c. 1500(Cary Nederman).- Chapter 7. Common Goods and the Common Good in John Duns Scotus(Nicolas Faucher).- Chapter 8. Old Wine in New Wineskins: William Ockham and the Common Good in Context(Roberto Lambertini).- Chapter 9. Is Socrates Permitted to Kill Plato?.- Part III: Common and Individual Good in Early Modern Philosophy(Juhana Toivanen).- Chapter 10. Alignment of the Individual and Common Good in the Political Theory of Johannes Althusius(Jukka Ruokanen).- Chapter 11. Individual and Common Utility within Grotius’s Theory of the State(Laetitia Ramelet).- Chapter 12. The Compatibility of Individual and Common Good in Hobbes’s Philosophy(Alexandra Chadwick).- Chapter 13. Self-Interest as a Source of the Common Good in Post-Hobbesian Natural Law(Heikki Haara).- Chapter 14. Self-Interest and the Common Good in Early Modern Philosophy(Colin Heydt).