Ruling Passions

Ruling Passions PDF Author: Simon Blackburn
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780199241392
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling original philosophy of human motivation and morality. He maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. So these are the sorts of questions he addresses: Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame, disgust, and other moral emotions; he draws also on game theory and cognitive science in his account of the structures of human motivation. Many philosophers have wanted a naturalistic ethics a theory that integrates our understanding of human morality with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. What is special about Blackburn's naturalistic ethics is that it does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical. At the same time he banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions sets ethics in the context of human nature: it offers a solution to the puzzle of how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control.

Ruling Passions

Ruling Passions PDF Author: Simon Blackburn
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780199241392
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling original philosophy of human motivation and morality. He maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. So these are the sorts of questions he addresses: Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame, disgust, and other moral emotions; he draws also on game theory and cognitive science in his account of the structures of human motivation. Many philosophers have wanted a naturalistic ethics a theory that integrates our understanding of human morality with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. What is special about Blackburn's naturalistic ethics is that it does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical. At the same time he banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions sets ethics in the context of human nature: it offers a solution to the puzzle of how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control.

Ruling Passions

Ruling Passions PDF Author: Andrew Sabl
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825008
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Get Book Here

Book Description
How should politicians act? When should they try to lead public opinion and when should they follow it? Should politicians see themselves as experts, whose opinions have greater authority than other people's, or as participants in a common dialogue with ordinary citizens? When do virtues like toleration and willingness to compromise deteriorate into moral weakness? In this innovative work, Andrew Sabl answers these questions by exploring what a democratic polity needs from its leaders. He concludes that there are systematic, principled reasons for the holders of divergent political offices or roles to act differently. Sabl argues that the morally committed civil rights activist, the elected representative pursuing legislative results, and the grassroots organizer determined to empower ordinary citizens all have crucial democratic functions. But they are different functions, calling for different practices and different qualities of political character. To make this case, he draws on political theory, moral philosophy, leadership studies, and biographical examples ranging from Everett Dirksen to Ella Baker, Frances Willard to Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr. to Joe McCarthy. Ruling Passions asks democratic theorists to pay more attention to the "governing pluralism" that characterizes a diverse, complex democracy. It challenges moral philosophy to adapt its prescriptions to the real requirements of democratic life, to pay more attention to the virtues of political compromise and the varieties of human character. And it calls on all democratic citizens to appreciate "democratic constancy": the limited yet serious standard of ethical character to which imperfect democratic citizens may rightly hold their leaders--and themselves.

Passions and Projections

Passions and Projections PDF Author: Robert Neal Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198723172
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume presents fourteen original essays which explore the philosophy of Simon Blackburn, and his lifetime pursuit of a distinctive projectivist and anti-realist research program. The essays document the range and influence of Blackburn's work and reveal, among other things, the resourcefulness of his brand of philosophical pragmatism.

The Ruling Passion

The Ruling Passion PDF Author: Henry Van Dyke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description


Ruling Passion

Ruling Passion PDF Author: Waller Randy Newell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847697274
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ruling Passion is the only book-length study of tyranny, statesmanship, and civic virtue in three major Platonic dialogues, the Georgias, the Symposium, and the Republic. It is also the first extended interpretation of eros as the key to Plato's understanding of both the depths of human vice and the heights of human aspirations for virtue and happiness. Through his detailed commentary and eloquent insights on the three dialogues, Waller Newell demonstrates how, for Plato, tyranny is a misguided longing for erotic satisfaction that can be corrected by the education of eros toward the proper objects if its pleasure: civic virtue and philosophy. In unfolding these reflections through his analysis, Newell also demonstrates a rich and deep grasp of the complexities of the tyrannical personality and countless new insights into the dramatic dimensions of Plato's dialogues. Written in a clear and engaging style, Ruling Passion will be of interest to philosophers, political theorists, classicists, historians, and anyone generally intrigued by the ironies, mysteries, and longings of human nature and psychology.

On Politics

On Politics PDF Author: Alan Ryan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871404656
Category : Political science
Languages : en
Pages : 1147

Get Book Here

Book Description
Looks at the history of politics from Hobbes to the twenty-first century.

Being Realistic about Reasons

Being Realistic about Reasons PDF Author: T. M. Scanlon
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199678480
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Get Book Here

Book Description
Is what we have reason to do a matter of fact? If so, what kind of truth is involved, how can we know it, and how do reasons motivate and explain action? In this concise and lucid book T.M. Scanlon offers answers, with a qualified defence of normative cognitivism - the view that there are normative truths about reasons for action.

Orthodox Passions

Orthodox Passions PDF Author: Maram Epstein
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176069
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Maram Epstein identifies filial piety as the dominant expression of love in Qing dynasty texts. At a time when Manchu regulations made chastity the primary metaphor for obedience and social duty, filial discourse increasingly embraced the dramatic and passionate excesses associated with late-Ming chastity narratives. Qing texts, especially those from the Jiangnan region, celebrate modes of filial piety that conflicted with the interests of the patriarchal family and the state. Analyzing filial narratives from a wide range of primary texts, including local gazetteers, autobiographical and biographical nianpu records, and fiction, Epstein shows the diversity of acts constituting exemplary filial piety. This context, Orthodox Passions argues, enables a radical rereading of the great novel of manners The Story of the Stone (ca. 1760), whose absence of filial affections and themes make it an outlier in the eighteenth-century sentimental landscape. By decentering romantic feeling as the dominant expression of love during the High Qing, Orthodox Passions calls for a new understanding of the affective landscape of late imperial China.

The Ruling Passion

The Ruling Passion PDF Author: Linda Berdoll
Publisher: Well, There It is Publishers
ISBN: 9780967481739
Category : Bennet, Elizabeth (Fictitious character)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ms. Berdoll has also authored Fandango, a historical romance set during San Francisco's Gold Rush. Her research for her novels also birthed a humorous look at euphemisms, Very Nice Ways to Say Very Bad Things. She is happily married to her high-school sweetheart and lives outside Austin, Texas.

Ruling Passions

Ruling Passions PDF Author: Sue Lees
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
The legitimising of male violence against women and the way that women are represented in rape trials are part of the process that lead to injustice for women in today's Britain. The author explores these themes whilst drawing upon Foucault's ideas.