Reconstructing Schopenhauer's Ethics

Reconstructing Schopenhauer's Ethics PDF Author: Sandra Shapshay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190906812
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
At the apex of his influence, from about 1860 up to the start of World War I, Schopenhauer was known first and foremost as a philosopher of pessimism. Still today, his main reputation is as one of the few philosophers to have argued that it would have been better never to have been. Sandra Shapshay aims to complicate and challenge this predominant picture of Schopenhauer's ethical thought, arguing that while the pessimistic, resigned Schopenhauer represents one side of the thinker, there is another, more hopeful side that is equally important to his legacy and essential to fully understanding his philosophy. Schopenhauer's ethical thought contains a hopeful, progressive strand, and the main task of this book is to reconstruct it. The resulting position, which Shapshay terms "compassionate moral realism," offers a hybrid Kantian moral realist/sentimentalist theory and a Schopenhauerian value ontology of degrees of inherent value. The reconstruction is novel in three main ways. First, it views Schopenhauer as a more faithful Kantian than most commentators have been apt to recognize. Second, it sees Schopenhauer's philosophy as an evolving rather than static body of thought, especially with respect to the place of the Platonic Ideas in his system; Schopenhauer's views in the philosophy of nature changed as he encountered proto-Darwinian thought, and this change weakens Schopenhauer's own grounds for pessimism. A third novelty is the claim, concerning his ethical thought, that there are really two Schopenhauers rather than one: the "Knight of Despair" and the "Knight of Hope" distinction introduced in this book helps to capture the incompatibility between the resignationist and the compassionate moral realist sides of Schopenhauer's ethical thought.

Reconstructing Schopenhauer's Ethics

Reconstructing Schopenhauer's Ethics PDF Author: Sandra Shapshay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190906812
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
At the apex of his influence, from about 1860 up to the start of World War I, Schopenhauer was known first and foremost as a philosopher of pessimism. Still today, his main reputation is as one of the few philosophers to have argued that it would have been better never to have been. Sandra Shapshay aims to complicate and challenge this predominant picture of Schopenhauer's ethical thought, arguing that while the pessimistic, resigned Schopenhauer represents one side of the thinker, there is another, more hopeful side that is equally important to his legacy and essential to fully understanding his philosophy. Schopenhauer's ethical thought contains a hopeful, progressive strand, and the main task of this book is to reconstruct it. The resulting position, which Shapshay terms "compassionate moral realism," offers a hybrid Kantian moral realist/sentimentalist theory and a Schopenhauerian value ontology of degrees of inherent value. The reconstruction is novel in three main ways. First, it views Schopenhauer as a more faithful Kantian than most commentators have been apt to recognize. Second, it sees Schopenhauer's philosophy as an evolving rather than static body of thought, especially with respect to the place of the Platonic Ideas in his system; Schopenhauer's views in the philosophy of nature changed as he encountered proto-Darwinian thought, and this change weakens Schopenhauer's own grounds for pessimism. A third novelty is the claim, concerning his ethical thought, that there are really two Schopenhauers rather than one: the "Knight of Despair" and the "Knight of Hope" distinction introduced in this book helps to capture the incompatibility between the resignationist and the compassionate moral realist sides of Schopenhauer's ethical thought.

Reconstructing Schopenhauer's Ethics

Reconstructing Schopenhauer's Ethics PDF Author: Sandra Shapshay
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190906804
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book articulates and defends an interpretation of Schopenhauer's ethics as an original and credible contribution to the history of ethics. It presents Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion in direct tension with his resignationism and aims to show surprising continuities with Kant's ethics.

Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer

Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer PDF Author: Jens Lemanski
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030330907
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The chapters in this timely volume aim to answer the growing interest in Arthur Schopenhauer’s logic, mathematics, and philosophy of language by comprehensively exploring his work on mathematical evidence, logic diagrams, and problems of semantics. Thus, this work addresses the lack of research on these subjects in the context of Schopenhauer’s oeuvre by exposing their links to modern research areas, such as the “proof without words” movement, analytic philosophy and diagrammatic reasoning, demonstrating its continued relevance to current discourse on logic. Beginning with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of language, the chapters examine the individual aspects of his semantics, semiotics, translation theory, language criticism, and communication theory. Additionally, Schopenhauer’s anticipation of modern contextualism is analyzed. The second section then addresses his logic, examining proof theory, metalogic, system of natural deduction, conversion theory, logical geometry, and the history of logic. Special focus is given to the role of the Euler diagrams used frequently in his lectures and their significance to broader context of his logic. In the final section, chapters discuss Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mathematics while synthesizing all topics from the previous sections, emphasizing the relationship between intuition and concept. Aimed at a variety of academics, including researchers of Schopenhauer, philosophers, historians, logicians, mathematicians, and linguists, this title serves as a unique and vital resource for those interested in expanding their knowledge of Schopenhauer’s work as it relates to modern mathematical and logical study.

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.

Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy

Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy PDF Author: Ken Gemes
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199231567
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Nietzsche is a central figure in our modern understanding of the individual as freely determining his or her own values. These essays by leading Nietzsche scholars investigate what this freedom really means: How free are we really? What does it take to be free? It might be a 'right', but it also needs to be earned.

The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche

The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche PDF Author: Ken Gemes
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 0199534640
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 809

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Book Description
An international team of scholars offer a broad engagement with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. They discuss the main topics of his philosophy, under the headings of values, epistemology and metaphysics, and will to power. Other sections are devoted to his life, his relations to other philosophers, and his individual works.

Hegel's Conscience

Hegel's Conscience PDF Author: Dean Moyar
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195391993
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book provides a new interpretation of the ethical theory of G.W.F. Hegel. The aim is not only to give a new interpretation for specialists in German Idealism, but also to provide an analysis that makes Hegel's ethics accessible for all scholars working in ethical and political philosophy. While Hegel's political philosophy has received a good deal of attention in the literature, the core of his ethics has eluded careful exposition, in large part because it is contained in his claims about conscience. This book shows that, contrary to accepted wisdom, conscience is the central concept for understanding Hegel's view of practical reason and therefore for understanding his ethics as a whole. The argument combines careful exegesis of key passages in Hegel's texts with detailed treatments of problems in contemporary ethics and reconstructions of Hegel's answers to those problems. The main goals are to render comprehensible Hegel's notoriously difficult texts by framing arguments with debates in contemporary ethics, and to show that Hegel still has much to teach us about the issues that matter to us most. Central topics covered in the book are the connection of self-consciousness and agency, the relation of motivating and justifying reasons, moral deliberation and the holism of moral reasoning, mutual recognition, and the rationality of social institutions.

Nietzsche and Rée

Nietzsche and Rée PDF Author: Robin Small
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191535184
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
During years of close friendship, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Paul Rée (1849-1901) shared ideas and developed a new and original approach to philosophy and ethics. The course of their partnership, from its origins in shared hopes to its ending in a painful breakdown of personal relations, is the subject of this book. The full story has not been told before. Some of its biographical aspects - especially the three-sided relationship involving the young Lou Salomé which had severe emotional consequences for Nietzsche - have been known. Yet many personal details are presented here for the first time. The philosophical account is equally absorbing, showing how this collaboration was a crucial stage on Nietzsche's way toward his most original and radical contributions to philosophy. 'Réealism' was the label Nietzsche gave to Rée's naturalistic doctrine, which drew on the evolutionary theory of natural selection to explain the moral concepts of good, evil, conscience and justice. Just as importantly, Rée wrote in a cool, highly disciplined style, very different from most German writers of the time. Both aspects of his work made a strong impact on Nietzsche, who developed this project in his own way in a series of works starting with Human, All-Too-Human. Yet he eventually came to criticise and reject 'Réealism' as inadequate to the task of a revaluation of values, and replaced the 'historical approach' with his own genealogy of morality. In a strikingly poetic passage in The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes a 'star friendship': the brief meeting of two stars whose paths cross and then diverge forever, perhaps as part of some pattern beyond their knowledge. This book gives the 'star friendship' of Nietzsche and Rée the treatment it has always needed. In doing so, it brings to light fresh aspects of one of the most important of modern thinkers.

Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy

Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy PDF Author: J. B. Schneewind
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199563012
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
J.B. Schneewind presents a selection of his published essays on ethics, the history of ethics and moral psychology, together with a new piece offering an intellectual autobiography. The essays range across the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, with a particular focus on Kant and his relation to earlier thinkers.

Rethinking Responsibility

Rethinking Responsibility PDF Author: K. E. Boxer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199695326
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
K. E. Boxer explores moral responsibility, and whether it is compatible with causal determinism. She suggests that to answer this question we must focus on responsibility in the sense of liability, and that an incompatibilist view may only be preserved on an understanding of the moral desert of punishment that many find morally problematic.