Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity PDF Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316820246
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity PDF Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316820246
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity PDF Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110717645X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
MacIntyre explores the philosophical, political, and moral issues encountered in understanding what the virtues require in contemporary social contexts.

Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity

Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity PDF Author: Jill Kraye
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402030010
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Over the past twenty years the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era has received increasing attention from experts in the history of philosophy. In part, this new interest arises from claims, made in literature aimed at a less specialist readership, that this transition was responsible for the subsequent philosophical and theological problems of the Enlightenment. Philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and theologians like John Milbank display a certain nostalgia for the medieval synthesis of Thomas Aquinas and, consequently, evaluate the period from 1300 to 1700 in rather negative terms. Other historians of philosophy writing for the general public, such as Charles Taylor, take a more positive view of the Reformation but nevertheless conclude that modernity has been shaped by 1 conflicts which stem from early modern times. Ethics and moral thought occupy a central place in these theories. It is assumed that we have lost something – the concept of virtue, for instance, or the source of common morality. Yet those who put forward such notions do not treat the history of ethics in detail. From the historian’s perspective, their far-reaching theoretical assumptions are based on a quite small body of textual evidence. In reality, there was a rich variety of approaches to moral thinking and ethical theories during the period from 1400 to 1600.

Casuistry and Modern Ethics

Casuistry and Modern Ethics PDF Author: Richard B. Miller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226526362
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Did the Gulf War defend moral principle or Western oil interests? Is violent pornography an act of free speech or an act of violence against women? In Casuistry and Modern Ethics, Richard B. Miller sheds new light on the potential of casuistry—case-based reasoning—for resolving these and other questions of conscience raised by the practical quandaries of modern life. Rejecting the packaging of moral experience within simple descriptions and inflexible principles, Miller argues instead for identifying and making sense of the ethically salient features of individual cases. Because this practical approach must cope with a diverse array of experiences, Miller draws on a wide variety of diagnostic tools from such fields as philosophy of science, legal reasoning, theology, literary theory, hermeneutics, and moral philosophy. Opening new avenues for practical reasoning, Miller's interdisciplinary work will challenge scholars who are interested in the intersections of ethics and political philosophy, cultural criticism, and debates about method in religion and morality.

Morality and Modernity

Morality and Modernity PDF Author: Ross Poole
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138178304
Category : Civilization, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book argues that the modern world calls into existence certain conceptions of morality, but destroys the grounds for taking them seriously. Modernity both needs morality and makes it impossible.

After Virtue

After Virtue PDF Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1623569818
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.

Moral Blindness

Moral Blindness PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074566962X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Evil is not confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme duress. Today it more frequently reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the casual turning away of one’s ethical gaze. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we take as normality and in the triviality and banality of everyday life, and not just in the abnormal and exceptional cases. The distinctive kind of moral blindness that characterizes our societies is brilliantly analysed by Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis through the concept of adiaphora: the placing of certain acts or categories of human beings outside of the universe of moral obligations and evaluations. Adiaphora implies an attitude of indifference to what is happening in the world – a moral numbness. In a life where rhythms are dictated by ratings wars and box-office returns, where people are preoccupied with the latest gadgets and forms of gossip, in our ‘hurried life’ where attention rarely has time to settle on any issue of importance, we are at serious risk of losing our sensitivity to the plight of the other. Only celebrities or media stars can expect to be noticed in a society stuffed with sensational, valueless information. This probing inquiry into the fate of our moral sensibilities will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the most profound changes that are silently shaping the lives of everyone in our contemporary liquid-modern world.

Revolutionary Aristotelianism

Revolutionary Aristotelianism PDF Author: Kelvin Knight
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311050734X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book includes revisions of papers originally presented at the inaugural conference of the International Society for MacIntyrean Philosophy, on the theme of Alasdair MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia, hosted by the Human Rights and Social Justice Research Institute at London Metropolitan University. The papers selected are by fifteen leading international philosophers and political theorists. Writing from a variety of perspectives, they address MacIntyre's accounts of Aristotelianism, Thomism and Marxism, his virtue ethics and metaethics, the development of his philosophical project, and his critiques of managerialism, capitalism and liberalism. The book concludes with an extensive response by MacIntyre, in which he clarifies his past arguments, his present position, and his relation to rival theories of moral, political and social practice.

Durkheim, Morals And Modernity

Durkheim, Morals And Modernity PDF Author: Willie Watts Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135366675
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Thorough and wide-ranging examination of the science of morals, reviving and defending the tradition of a scientific approach to ethics. Engages with recent debates on modernism and morality, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of Durkheim's ideas. This book is intended for social and political theory, philosophy of science and Durkheimian studies within sociology, philosophy and politics.

On Moral Personhood

On Moral Personhood PDF Author: Richard Eldridge
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226203164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In this remarkable blend of sophisticated philosophical analysis and close reading of literary texts, Richard Eldridge presents a convincing argument that literature is the most important and richest source of insights in favor of a historicized Kantian moral philosophy. He effectively demonstrates that only through the interpretation of narratives can we test our capacities as persons for acknowledging the moral laws as a formula of value and for acting according to it. Eldridge presents an extensive new interpretation of Kantian ethics that is deeply informed by Kant's aesthetics. He defends a revised version of Kantian universalism and a Kantian conception of the content of morality. Eldridge then turns to literature armed not with any a priori theory but with an interpretive stance inspired by Hegel's phenomenology of self-understanding, more or less naturalized, and by Wittgenstein's work on self-understanding as ongoing narrative-interpretive activity, a stance that yields Kantian results about the universal demands our nature places on itself. Eldridge goes on to present readings of novels by Conrad and Austen and poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge. In each text protagonists are seen to be struggling with moral conflicts and for self-understanding as moral persons. The route toward partial resolution of their conflicts is seen to involve multiple and ongoing activities of reading and interpreting. The result of this kind of interpretation is that such literature—literature that portrays protagonists as themselves readers and interpreters of human capacities for morality—is a primary source for the development of morally significant self-understanding. We see in the careers of these protagonists that there can be genuine and fruitful moral deliberation and valuable action, while also seeing how situated and partial any understanding and achievement of value must remain. On Moral Personhood at once delineates the moral nature of persons; shows various conditions of the ongoing, contextualized, partial acknowledgment of that nature and of the exercise of the capacities that define it; and enacts an important way of reading literature in relation to moral problems. Eldridge's work will be important reading for moral philosophers (especially those concerned with Kant, Hegel, and issues dividing moral particularists from moral universalists), literary theorists (especially those concerned with the value of literature and its relation to philosophy and to moral problems), and readers and critics of Conrad, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen.