Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy

Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy PDF Author: Jonathan Wolff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691149003
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Previously unpublished writings from one of the most important political philosophers of recent times G. A. Cohen was one of the leading political philosophers of recent times. He first came to wide attention in 1978 with the prize-winning book Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. In subsequent decades his published writings largely turned away from the history of philosophy, focusing instead on equality, freedom, and justice. However, throughout his career he regularly lectured on a wide range of moral and political philosophers of the past. This volume collects these previously unpublished lectures. Starting with a chapter centered on Plato, but also discussing the pre-Socratics as well as Aristotle, the book moves to social contract theory as discussed by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, and then continues with chapters on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The book also contains some previously published but uncollected papers on Marx, Hobbes, and Kant, among other figures. The collection concludes with a memoir of Cohen written by the volume editor, Jonathan Wolff, who was a student of Cohen's. A hallmark of the lectures is Cohen's engagement with the thinkers he discusses. Rather than simply trying to render their thought accessible to the modern reader, he tests whether their arguments and positions are clear, sound, and free from contradiction. Throughout, he homes in on central issues and provides fresh approaches to the philosophers he examines. Ultimately, these lectures teach us not only about some of the great thinkers in the history of moral and political philosophy, but also about one of the great thinkers of our time: Cohen himself.

Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy

Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy PDF Author: Jonathan Wolff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691149003
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
Previously unpublished writings from one of the most important political philosophers of recent times G. A. Cohen was one of the leading political philosophers of recent times. He first came to wide attention in 1978 with the prize-winning book Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. In subsequent decades his published writings largely turned away from the history of philosophy, focusing instead on equality, freedom, and justice. However, throughout his career he regularly lectured on a wide range of moral and political philosophers of the past. This volume collects these previously unpublished lectures. Starting with a chapter centered on Plato, but also discussing the pre-Socratics as well as Aristotle, the book moves to social contract theory as discussed by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, and then continues with chapters on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The book also contains some previously published but uncollected papers on Marx, Hobbes, and Kant, among other figures. The collection concludes with a memoir of Cohen written by the volume editor, Jonathan Wolff, who was a student of Cohen's. A hallmark of the lectures is Cohen's engagement with the thinkers he discusses. Rather than simply trying to render their thought accessible to the modern reader, he tests whether their arguments and positions are clear, sound, and free from contradiction. Throughout, he homes in on central issues and provides fresh approaches to the philosophers he examines. Ultimately, these lectures teach us not only about some of the great thinkers in the history of moral and political philosophy, but also about one of the great thinkers of our time: Cohen himself.

Fieldwork in Familiar Places

Fieldwork in Familiar Places PDF Author: Michele M. Moody-Adams
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674041196
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The persistence of deep moral disagreements--across cultures as well as within them--has created widespread skepticism about the objectivity of morality. Moral relativism, moral pessimism, and the denigration of ethics in comparison with science are the results. Fieldwork in Familiar Places challenges the misconceptions about morality, culture, and objectivity that support these skepticisms, to show that we can take moral disagreement seriously and yet retain our aspirations for moral objectivity. Michele Moody-Adams critically scrutinizes the anthropological evidence commonly used to support moral relativism. Drawing on extensive knowledge of the relevant anthropological literature, she dismantles the mystical conceptions of culture that underwrite relativism. She demonstrates that cultures are not hermetically sealed from each other, but are rather the product of eclectic mixtures and borrowings rich with contradictions and possibilities for change. The internal complexity of cultures is not only crucial for cultural survival, but will always thwart relativist efforts to confine moral judgments to a single culture. Fieldwork in Familiar Places will forever change the way we think about relativism: anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and philosophers alike will be forced to reconsider many of their theoretical presuppositions. Moody-Adams also challenges the notion that ethics is methodologically deficient because it does not meet standards set by natural science. She contends that ethics is an interpretive enterprise, not a failed naturalistic one: genuine ethical inquiry, including philosophical ethics, is a species of interpretive ethnography. We have reason for moral optimism, Moody-Adams argues. Even the most serious moral disagreements take place against a background of moral agreement, and thus genuine ethical inquiry will be fieldwork in familiar places. Philosophers can contribute to this enterprise, she believes, if they return to a Socratic conception of themselves as members of a rich and complex community of moral inquirers.

Natural Law and Moral Philosophy

Natural Law and Moral Philosophy PDF Author: Knud Haakonssen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521498029
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Providing the most comprehensive guide to modern natural law theory available, this major contribution to the history of philosophy sets out the full background to liberal ideas of rights and contractarianism, and offers an extensive study of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy

Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy PDF Author: Jerome B. Schneewind
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198245520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics challenges comparison, as no other work in moral philosophy, with Aristotle's Ethics in the depth of its understanding of practical rationality, and in its architectural coherence it rivals the work of Kant. In this historical, rather than critical study, Professor Schneewind shows how Sidgwick's arguments and conclusions represent rational developments of the work of Sidgwick's predecessors, and brings out the nature and structure of the reasoning underlying his position.

The Emergence of Autonomy in Kant's Moral Philosophy

The Emergence of Autonomy in Kant's Moral Philosophy PDF Author: Stefano Bacin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107182859
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
A thorough study of why Kant developed the concept of autonomy, one of his central legacies for contemporary moral thought.

A Culture of Rights

A Culture of Rights PDF Author: Michael James Lacey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521446532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
The essays in this volume provide insights into the rights thinking and consciousness at the core of American political culture.

The Birth of Ethics

The Birth of Ethics PDF Author: Philip Pettit
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190904933
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Imagine a human society, perhaps in pre-history, in which people were generally of a psychological kind with us, had the use of natural language to communicate with one another, but did not have any properly moral concepts in which to exhort one another to meet certain standards and to lodge related claims and complaints. According to The Birth of Ethics, the members of that society would have faced a set of pressures, and made a series of adjustments in response, sufficient to put them within reach of ethical concepts. Without any planning, they would have more or less inevitably evolved a way of using such concepts to articulate desirable patterns of behavior and to hold themselves and one another responsible to those standards. Sooner or later, they would have entered ethical space. While this central claim is developed as a thesis in conjectural history or genealogy, the aim of the exercise is philosophical. Assuming that it explains the emergence of concepts and practices that are more or less equivalent to ours, the story offers us an account of the nature and role of morality. It directs us to the function that ethics plays in human life and alerts us to the character in virtue of which it can serve that function. The emerging view of morality has implications for the standard range of questions in meta-ethics and moral psychology, and enables us to understand why there are divisions in normative ethics like that between consequentialist and Kantian approaches.

Catalogue of the Library of Congress

Catalogue of the Library of Congress PDF Author: Library of Congress
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Library catalogs
Languages : en
Pages : 792

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Catalogue of the Library of the Literary and Philosophical Society, of Newcastle-upon Tyne

Catalogue of the Library of the Literary and Philosophical Society, of Newcastle-upon Tyne PDF Author: Literary and Philosophical Society (NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 900

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Bibliography of Philosophy, Psychology, and Cognate Subjects

Bibliography of Philosophy, Psychology, and Cognate Subjects PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 674

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Book Description