434 books match the query 'Ethics & Moral Philosophy' and 102 start with t

cover of Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture: A Philosophical Analysis

Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture

A Philosophical Analysis

Fritz Allhoff

University of Chicago Press, 2012

The general consensus among philosophers is that the use of torture is never justified. In Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture, Fritz Allhoff demonstrates the weakness of the case against torture; while allowing that torture constitutes a moral wrong, he nevertheless argues that, in exceptional cases, it represents the lesser of two evils.
 
Allhoff does not take this position lightly. He begins by examining the way terrorism challenges traditional norms, discussing the morality of various practices of torture, and critically exploring the infamous ticking time-bomb scenario. After carefully considering these issues from a purely philosophical perspective, he turns to the empirical ramifications of his arguments, addressing criticisms of torture and analyzing the impact its adoption could have on democracy, institutional structures, and foreign policy. The crucial questions of how to justly authorize torture and how to set limits on its use make up the final section of this timely, provocative, and carefully argued book.
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cover of The Aesthetics of Environment

The Aesthetics of Environment

Arnold Berleant

Temple University Press, 1995

"Not since Thoreau has an American author displayed such a profound appreciation for the aesthetics of nature; but, unlike Thoreau, Berleant has designed a program for allowing others to join in on that appreciation." --E. F. Kaelin, Professor of Philosophy, Florida State University Environmental aesthetics is an emerging discipline that explores the meaning and influence of environmental perception and experience on human life. Arguing for the idea that environment is not merely a setting for people but fully integrated and continuous with us, Arnold Berleant explores the aesthetic dimensions of the human-environment continuum in both theoretical terms and concrete situations. Insisting on the need to reconceptualize environment and recognize its aesthetic implications, he pursues a variety of topics and approaches to environmental aesthetics. Aesthetic experience, maintains Berleant, is always contextual. Recognizing that humans, along with all other things, inhabit a single intraconnected realm, he names the quality of engagement as the foremost characteristic of environmental perception. Berleant moves from natural to nonnatural environments, suggesting that the aesthetic aspect of any human habitat is an essential part of its desirability. From outer space to the museum, from architecture to landscape, from city to wilderness, this book discovers in the aesthetic perception of environment the reciprocity that constitutes both person and place. "Arnold Berleant's Aesthetics of Environment poses an important path for philosophy to walk down--instead of environmental ethics, where what is right and wrong in nature is discussed, he goes after the difficult destination of deciding how to articulate what is beautiful in the nature we want, not the nature we see." --Human Ecology Review "Berleant's new environmental aesthetics is a challenge not only to the philosophers but also to the practitioners of environment-making. With rich illustrations and freedom from technical jargon, Berleant applies his new aesthetics to analyzing and solving the practical problems concerning various environmental designs of today." --Canadian Philosophical Review "A pioneering contribution to this discipline. It raises a large number of challenging questions and suggests new dirrections in the analysis of the environment as an aesthetic category." --Michael H. Mutias, Professor of Philosophy, Millsaps College
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cover of The Affection in Between: From Common Sense to Sensing in Common

The Affection in Between

From Common Sense to Sensing in Common

April Flakne

Ohio University Press, 2022

Exposing a fundamental but forgotten capacity to sense with others, this fresh approach to ethics centers on expressive, moving bodies in everyday affective encounters. Common sense has yet to yield its golden promise: robust selves, a stable sense of reality, and bonds of solidarity. The Affection in Between argues that reimagining common sense involves tackling two intractable philosophical puzzles together: the problems of sensory integration and of “other minds.” Construing common sense as either an individual cognitive capacity or a communal body of beliefs and practices, as our tradition of philosophical and political thought has done for too long, constricts possibilities of self and other, ethics and politics. Neither register alone can evade political manipulation and deliver common ground between confident yet unavoidably porous selves. April Flakne begins with a novel interpretation of the neglected Aristotelian concept of sunaisthesis, an embodied, interactive capacity to create overlapping meaning through the cultivation of a sensibility that is neither individual nor communal but unfolds between bodies in movement. Bolstering Aristotle’s concept with classical and contemporary phenomenology, including critical phenomenology, empirical theories of social cognition, and affect theory, Flakne offers fresh answers to a pressing and legitimate skepticism about selfhood and the role that ethics might play in countering disorientation and manufactured division. Through an exploration of the intimate experiences of birth, death, caregiving, and mourning, Flakne brings the ethical and political aspects of interembodied interaction home and into lived experience.
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cover of The American Moralist: On Law, Ethics, And Government

The American Moralist

On Law, Ethics, And Government

George Anastaplo

Ohio University Press, 1994

The essays collected here, somewhat autobiographical in their effect, range from a discussion of the despair of the Cold War and Vietnam in 1966 to reflections on the euphoria over the ending of the Cold War in Eastern Europe in 1990. The opening essays are general in nature: exploring the foundation and limitation of sound morality; examining what is “American” about American morality; measuring all by the yardsticks provided by classical and modern philosophers. Anastaplo’s overriding concern here is to show how one can be moral without being either cranky or moralistic. He then turns his attention to the issues of the day: the first amendment, religious liberty, women and the law, gun control, medicine, capital punishment, local politics, civil disobedience.
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cover of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice

The Animal Claim

Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice

Tobias Menely

University of Chicago Press, 2015

During the eighteenth century, some of the most popular British poetry showed a responsiveness to animals that anticipated the later language of animal rights. Such poems were widely cited in later years by legislators advocating animal welfare laws like Martin’s Act of 1822, which provided protections for livestock. In The Animal Claim, Tobias Menely links this poetics of sensibility with Enlightenment political philosophy, the rise of the humanitarian public, and the fate of sentimentality, as well as longstanding theoretical questions about voice as a medium of communication.    
      
In the Restoration and eighteenth century, philosophers emphasized the role of sympathy in collective life and began regarding the passionate expression humans share with animals, rather than the spoken or written word, as the elemental medium of community. Menely shows how poetry came to represent this creaturely voice and, by virtue of this advocacy, facilitated the development of a viable discourse of animal rights in the emerging public sphere. Placing sensibility in dialogue with classical and early-modern antecedents as well as contemporary animal studies, The Animal Claim uncovers crucial connections between eighteenth-century poetry; theories of communication; and post-absolutist, rights-based politics.  
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cover of The Anthrobscene

The Anthrobscene

Jussi Parikka

University of Minnesota Press, 2014

Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and e-readers all at one time held the promise of a more environmentally healthy world not dependent on paper and deforestation. The result of our ubiquitous digital lives is, as we see in The Anthrobscene, actually quite the opposite: not ecological health but an environmental wasteland, where media never die. Jussi Parikka critiques corporate and human desires as a geophysical force, analyzing the material side of the earth as essential for the existence of media and introducing the notion of an alternative deep time in which media live on in the layer of toxic waste we will leave behind as our geological legacy. 

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
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cover of The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Peninsular Novel

The Art of Time

Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Peninsular Novel

Nina L. Molinaro

Bucknell University Press, 2019

Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question “what should I do?” has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. One of the foremost theorists of ethics during the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that “the ethical” is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Levinas’s voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or “otherness,” which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness.

Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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cover of The Bad Conscience

The Bad Conscience

Vladimir Jankélévitch

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Vladimir Jankélévitch was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century philosophy. In The Bad Conscience—published in 1933 and subsequently revised and expanded—Jankélévitch lays the foundations for his later work, Forgiveness, grappling with the conditions that give rise to the moral awareness without which forgiveness would make no sense. Remorse, or “the bad conscience,” arises from the realization that the acts one has committed become irrevocable. This realization, in turn, gives rise to an awareness of moral virtues and values, as well as freedom and the responsibilities freedom entails. Thus, while the majority of moral systems try to shield us from remorse, the remedy for the bad conscience lies not in repentance but in the experience of remorse itself.
           
To this careful and sensitive English-language translation of The Bad Conscience, translator Andrew Kelley has added a substantial introduction situating the work in historical and intellectual context. Notes throughout indicate differences between this and earlier editions. A thought-provoking critique of standard conceptions of moral philosophy, The Bad Conscience restores this work by an important philosopher who has only recently begun to receive his due from the English-speaking world.
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cover of The Beneficiary

The Beneficiary

Bruce Robbins

Duke University Press, 2017

From iPhones and clothing to jewelry and food, the products those of us in the developed world consume and enjoy exist only through the labor and suffering of countless others. In his new book Bruce Robbins examines the implications of this dynamic for humanitarianism and social justice. He locates the figure of the "beneficiary" in the history of humanitarian thought, which asks the prosperous to help the poor without requiring them to recognize their causal role in the creation of the abhorrent conditions they seek to remedy. Tracing how the beneficiary has manifested itself in the work of George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Naomi Klein, and others, Robbins uncovers a hidden tradition of economic cosmopolitanism. There are no easy answers to the question of how to confront systematic inequality on a global scale. But the first step, Robbins suggests, is to acknowledge that we are, in fact, beneficiaries.
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cover of The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900-1955

The Common Cause

Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900-1955

Leela Gandhi

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism—an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But, she also illuminates an ethic of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual discipline.
 
Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and offers it to us as a key to democracy’s future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common.
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cover of The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy

The Culmination

Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy

Robert B. Pippin

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A provocative reassessment of Heidegger’s critique of German Idealism from one of the tradition’s foremost interpreters.

Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy ended—failed, even—in the German Idealist tradition. In The Culmination, Robert B. Pippin explores the ramifications of this charge through a masterful survey of Western philosophy, especially Heidegger’s critiques of Hegel and Kant. Pippin argues that Heidegger’s basic concern was to determine sources of meaning for human life, particularly those that had been obscured by Western philosophy’s attention to reason. The Culmination offers a new interpretation of Heidegger, German Idealism, and the fate of Western rationalism.
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cover of The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone

The Deepest Human Life

An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone

Scott Samuelson

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Winner of the 2015 Hiett Prize in the Humanities. 

Sometimes it seems like you need a PhD just to open a book of philosophy. We leave philosophical matters to the philosophers in the same way that we leave science to scientists. Scott Samuelson thinks this is tragic, for our lives as well as for philosophy. In The Deepest Human Life he takes philosophy back from the specialists and restores it to its proper place at the center of our humanity, rediscovering it as our most profound effort toward understanding, as a way of life that anyone can live. Exploring the works of some of history’s most important thinkers in the context of the everyday struggles of his students, he guides us through the most vexing quandaries of our existence—and shows just how enriching the examined life can be.
           
Samuelson begins at the beginning: with Socrates, working his most famous assertion—that wisdom is knowing that one knows nothing—into a method, a way of approaching our greatest mysteries. From there he springboards into a rich history of philosophy and the ways its journey is encoded in our own quests for meaning. He ruminates on Epicurus against the sonic backdrop of crickets and restaurant goers in Iowa City. He follows the Stoics into the cell where James Stockdale spent seven years as a prisoner of war. He spins with al-Ghazali first in doubt, then in the ecstasy of the divine. And he gets the philosophy education of his life when one of his students, who authorized a risky surgery for her son that inadvertently led to his death, asks with tears in her eyes if Kant was right, if it really is the motive that matters and not the consequences. Through heartbreaking stories, humanizing biographies, accessible theory, and evocative interludes like “On Wine and Bicycles” or “On Zombies and Superheroes ,” he invests philosophy with the personal and vice versa. The result is a book that is at once a primer and a reassurance—that the most important questions endure, coming to life in each of us. 

 
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cover of The Dialectical Necessity of Morality: An Analysis and Defense of Alan Gewirth's Argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency

The Dialectical Necessity of Morality

An Analysis and Defense of Alan Gewirth's Argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency

Deryck Beyleveld

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Alan Gewirth's Reason and Morality, in which he set forth the Principle of Generic Consistency, is a major work of modern ethical theory that, though much debated and highly respected, has yet to gain full acceptance. Deryck Beyleveld contends that this resistance stems from misunderstanding of the method and logical operations of Gewirth's central argument. In this book Beyleveld seeks to remedy this deficiency. His rigorous reconstruction of Gewirth's argument gives its various parts their most compelling formulation and clarifies its essential logical structure.

Beyleveld then classifies all the criticisms that Gewirth's argument has received and measures them against his reconstruction of the argument. The overall result is an immensely rich picture of the argument, in which all of its complex issues and key moves are clearly displayed and its validity can finally be discerned.

The comprehensiveness of Beyleveld's treatment provides ready access to the entire debate surrounding the foundational argument of Reason and Morality. It will be required reading for all who are interested in Gewirth's theory and deontological ethics and will be of central importance to moral and legal theorists.
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cover of The Distressed Body: Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing

The Distressed Body

Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing

Drew Leder

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Bodily pain and distress come in many forms. They can well up from within at times of serious illness, but the body can also be subjected to harsh treatment from outside. The medical system is often cold and depersonalized, and much worse are conditions experienced by prisoners in our age of mass incarceration, and by animals trapped in our factory farms. In this pioneering book, Drew Leder offers bold new ways to rethink how we create and treat distress, clearing the way for more humane social practices.
           
Leder draws on literary examples, clinical and philosophical sources, his medical training, and his own struggle with chronic pain. He levies a challenge to the capitalist and Cartesian models that rule modern medicine. Similarly, he looks at the root paradigms of our penitentiary and factory farm systems and the way these produce distressed bodies, asking how such institutions can be reformed. Writing with coauthors ranging from a prominent cardiologist to long-term inmates, he explores alternative environments that can better humanize—even spiritualize—the way we treat one another, offering a very different vision of medical, criminal justice, and food systems. Ultimately Leder proposes not just new answers to important bioethical questions but new ways of questioning accepted concepts and practices.
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cover of The Early Works of John Dewey, Volume 3, 1882 - 1898: Essays and Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, 1889-1892

The Early Works of John Dewey, Volume 3, 1882 - 1898

Essays and Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, 1889-1892

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey’s early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan. Morris’s death in 1889 left vacant the Department of Philosophy chairmanship and led to Dewey’s returning to fill that post after a year’s stay at Minnesota.

 

Appearing here, among all his writings from 1889 through 1892, are Dewey’s earliest comprehensive statements on logic and his first book on ethics. Dewey’s marked copy of the galley-proof for his important article “The Present Position of Logical Theory,” recently discovered among the papers of the Open Court Publishing Company, is used as the basis for the text, making available for the first time his final changes and corrections.

 

The textual studies that make The Early Works unique among American philosophical editions are reported in detail. One of these, “A Note on Applied Psychology,” documents the fact that Dewey did not co-author this book frequently attributed to him. Six brief unsigned articles written in 1891 for a University of Michigan student publication, the Inlander, have been identified as Dewey’s and are also included in this volume. In both style and content, these articles reflect Dewey’s conviction that philosophy should be used as a means of illuminating the contemporary scene; thus they add a new dimension to present knowledge of his early writing.

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cover of The Early Works of John Dewey, Volume 4, 1882 - 1898: Early Essays and The Study of Ethics, A Syllabus, 1893-1894

The Early Works of John Dewey, Volume 4, 1882 - 1898

Early Essays and The Study of Ethics, A Syllabus, 1893-1894

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Volume 4 of’ “The Early Works” series covers the period of Dewey’s last year and one-half at the University of Michigan and his first half-year at the University of Chicago. In addition to sixteen articles the present volume contains Dewey’s reviews of six books and three articles, verbatim reports of three oral statements made by Dewey, and a full-length book, The Study of Ethics.

 

Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of interpretive or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and Wayne A. R. Leys, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, has written an Introduction discussing the relationship between Dewey’s writings of this period and his later work. That Dewey’s scholarship and writing was at an especially high level during 1893 and 1894 may be considered an index to the significance of this two-year period.

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cover of The Early Works of John Dewey, Volume 5, 1882 - 1898: Early Essays, 1895-1898

The Early Works of John Dewey, Volume 5, 1882 - 1898

Early Essays, 1895-1898

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

This fifth and concluding volume of “The Early Works of John Dewey” is the only one of the series made up entirely of essays. The appear­ance during the four-year period, 1895–98, of thirty-eight items amply indicates that Dewey continued to maintain a high level of published out­put. These were the years of Dewey’s most extensive work and involvement at the University of Chicago.

 

Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of interpretive or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and William P. McKenzie, Professor of Philoso­phy and Education at Southern Illinois University, has written an introduc­tion identifying the thread connecting the apparently diffuse material in the many articles of this volume—Dewey’s attempt to unite philosophy with psychology and sociology and with education.

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cover of The Embers and the Stars

The Embers and the Stars

Erazim Kohák

University of Chicago Press, 1987

"It is hard to put this profound book into a category. Despite the author's criticisms of Thoreau, it is more like Walden than any other book I have read. . . . The book makes great strides toward bringing the best insights from medieval philosophy and from contemporary environmental ethics together. Anyone interested in both of these areas must read this book."—Daniel A. Dombrowski, The Thomist

"Those who share Kohák's concern to understand nature as other than a mere resource or matter in motion will find his temporally oriented interpretation of nature instructive. It is here in particular that Kohák turns moments of experience to account philosophically, turning what we habitually overlook or avoid into an opportunity and basis for self-knowledge. This is an impassioned attempt to see the vital order of nature and the moral order of our humanity as one."—Ethics
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cover of The Erotic Phenomenon

The Erotic Phenomenon

Jean-Luc Marion

University of Chicago Press, 2006

While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of love itself.

Marion begins his profound and personal book with a critique of Descartes’ equation of the ego’s ability to doubt with the certainty that one exists—“I think, therefore I am”—arguing that this is worse than vain. We encounter being, he says, when we first experience love: I am loved, therefore I am; and this love is the reason I care whether I exist or not. This philosophical base allows Marion to probe several manifestations of love and its variations, including carnal excitement, self-hate, lying and perversion, fidelity, the generation of children, and the love of God. Throughout, Marion stresses that all erotic phenomena, including sentimentality, pornography, and even boasts about one’s sexual conquests, stem not from the ego as popularly understood but instead from love.

A thoroughly enlightening and captivating philosophical investigation of a strangely neglected subject, The Erotic Phenomenon is certain to initiate feverish new dialogue about the philosophical meanings of that most desirable and mysterious of all concepts—love.

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cover of The Ethic of the Upward Gaze: Essays Inspired by Immanuel Kant and Nicolai Hartmann

The Ethic of the Upward Gaze

Essays Inspired by Immanuel Kant and Nicolai Hartmann

predrag cicovacki

St. Augustine's Press, 2024

"Kant and Hartmann share a belief that is less common than it once was: that the aim of morality is to guide us toward becoming the best version of ourselves. Morality is not the same as prudence, nor is it a utilitarian calculus about what actions lead to our advantage. Yes, we do need to see what is in front of us, and handle what demands our immediate attention, in accordance with the rules endorsed by our societies. We also need to secure our existence as well as the material flourishing of ourselves and those who depend on us. But focusing exclusively on such issues deflects our consciousness from the high road of morality. […]
     These essays explore ideas relating to the suffocating and hope-crushing atmosphere of negativity and disorientation in the contemporary world. The message of this collection is that, if we dare to open our eyes and our hearts, we can find that there is much in ourselves and the world that deserves our reverence and our loving gaze. It is not too late to recall that besides the natural and the social worlds, there is yet another order of being: the spiritual. And without a connection with this spiritual order, we cannot experience our humanity at its best."


 
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cover of The Ethical Case against Animal Experiments

The Ethical Case against Animal Experiments

Andrew Linzey, Clair Linzey

University of Illinois Press, 2018

At present, human beings worldwide are using an estimated 115.3 million animals in experiments—a normalization of the unthinkable on an immense scale. In terms of harm, pain, suffering, and death, animal experiments constitute one of the major moral issues of our time. Given today’s deeper understanding of animal sentience, the contributors to this volume argue that we must afford animals a special moral consideration that precludes their use in experiments.

The Ethical Case against Animal Experiments begins with the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics's groundbreaking and comprehensive ethical critique of the practice of animal experiments. A second section offers original writings that engage with, and elaborate on, aspects of the Oxford Centre report. The essayists explore historical, philosophical, and personal perspectives that range from animal experiments in classical times to the place of necessity in animal research to one researcher's painful journey from researcher to opponent.

A devastating look at a contemporary moral crisis, The Ethical Case against Animal Experiments melds logic and compassion to mount a powerful challenge to human cruelty.

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cover of The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value

The Ethical Condition

Essays on Action, Person, and Value

Michael Lambek

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Written over a thirty-year span, Michael Lambek’s essays in this collection point with definitive force toward a single central truth: ethics is intrinsic to social life. As he shows through rich ethnographic accounts and multiple theoretical traditions, our human condition is at heart an ethical one—we may not always be good or just, but we are always subject to their criteria. Detailing Lambek’s trajectory as one anthropologist thinking deeply throughout a career on the nature of ethical life, the essays accumulate into a vibrant demonstration of the relevance of ethics as a practice and its crucial importance to ethnography, social theory, and philosophy.

Organized chronologically, the essays begin among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte and in northwest Madagascar. Building from ethnographic accounts there, they synthesize Aristotelian notions of practical judgment and virtuous action with Wittgensteinian notions of the ordinariness of ethical life and the importance of language, everyday speech, and ritual in order to understand how ethics are lived. They illustrate the multiple ways in which ethics informs personhood, character, and practice; explore the centrality of judgment, action, and irony to ethical life; and consider the relation of virtue to value. The result is a fully fleshed-out picture of ethics as a deeply rooted aspect of the human experience. 
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cover of The Ethical Engineer: An "Ethics Construction Kit" Places Engineering in a New Light

The Ethical Engineer

An "Ethics Construction Kit" Places Engineering in a New Light

Eugene Schlossberger

Temple University Press, 1993

On occasion, professionals need to use moral reasoning as well as engineering skills to function effectively in their occupation. Eugene Schlossberger has created a practical guide to ethical decision-making for engineers, students, and workers in business and industry.

The Ethical Engineer sets out the tools and materials essential to dealing with whistle-blowing, environmental and safety concerns, bidding, confidentiality, conflict of interest, sales ethics, advertising, employer-employee relations, when to fight a battle, and when to break the rules.

The author offers recommendations and techniques as well as rules, principles, and values that can guide the reader. Lively examples, engaging anecdotes, witty comments, and well-reasoned analysis prove his conviction that "ethics is good business."

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cover of The Ethics of History

The Ethics of History

John McCumber

Northwestern University Press, 2004

What is implied by "ethics of history"? The authors of this volume, internationally renowned philosophers and intellectual historians, address this question in all its novelty and ambiguity and develop varied perspectives on the place and nature of ethics in the philosophy, enterprise, and practice of history.
Is the whole historical process--largely consisting of the actions and sufferings of persons and groups--subject to ethical constraint? And what of the ways in which historians present their subject matter; are these methods subject to moral scrutiny? Although they approach these issues from different directions, the contributors agree in their critique of the correspondence theory of history, tin their acceptance of an unbridgeable gap between the past and the historian's present account, and in their call for a revision of the popular appeal to historical objectivity.
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cover of The Ethics of Organ Transplantation

The Ethics of Organ Transplantation

Steven J. Jensen

Catholic University of America Press, 2011

These questions and others are thoughtfully probed in this collection of essays, which features articles from theologians, philosophers, physicians, biomedical ethicists, and an attorney.
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cover of The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies

The Ethics of Persuasion

Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies

Brooke Rollins

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

In The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida’s Rhetorical Legacies, Brooke Rollins argues that some of the most forceful and utilitarian examples of persuasion involve significant ethical dimensions. Using the work of Jacques Derrida, she draws this ethical imperative out from a series of canonical rhetorical texts that have traditionally been understood as insistent or even guileful instances of persuasion. Her reconsideration of highly determined pieces by Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato encourages readers to inherit the rhetorical tradition differently, and it pinpoints the important rhetorical dimensions of Derrida’s own work.

Drawing on Derrida’s (non)definition of ethics and his pointed accounts of performativity, Rollins argues that this vital ethical component of many ancient theories, practices, and pedagogies of persuasion has been undertheorized for more than two millennia. Through deconstructive readings of some of these texts, she shows us that we are not simply sovereign beings who both wield and guard against linguistic techniques of rule. Our persuasive endeavors, rather, are made possible by an ethics—an always prior encounter with otherness that interrupts self-presence.
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cover of The Ethics of Postmodernity: Current Trends in Continental Thought

The Ethics of Postmodernity

Current Trends in Continental Thought

Gary B. Madison and Marty Fairbarn

Northwestern University Press, 1997

In The Ethics of Postmodernity, Gary B. Madison and Marty Fairbairn have collected instructive and illuminating essays that address the dilemmas left in the wake of the postmodern attack on foundationalism. This collection is a powerful statement on the many directions a postmetaphysical ethics might take.

Contributors include Barry Allen, Caroline Bayard, Robert Bernasconi, Thomas W. Busch, M.C. Dillon, Marty Fairbairn, Paul Fairfield, Morny Joy, Richard Kearney, Gary B. Madison, Joseph Margolis, Tom Rockmore, Charles E. Scott, Evan Simpson, and Mark Williams.
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cover of The Ethics of St. Thomas Aquinas: Happiness, Natural Law, and the Virtues

The Ethics of St. Thomas Aquinas

Happiness, Natural Law, and the Virtues

Leo Elders

Catholic University of America Press, 2019

"Elders brings to his study an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the history of philosophy. Although he advises his readers not to look for any novel interpretations of Thomas, the book is full of surprises. Time and again, he offers a concise history of the moral issue under consideration...A more authoritative introduction to the moral philosophy of Aquinas is not likely to be found. In fact, it is a delight to read." - Philosophy in Review
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cover of The Fragile We: Ethical Implications Of Heidegger's "Being and Time"

The Fragile We

Ethical Implications Of Heidegger's "Being and Time"

Lawrence Vogel

Northwestern University Press, 1994

Critics have charged that Heidegger's account of authenticity is morally nihilistic, that his fundamental ontology is either egocentric or chauvinistic; and many see Heidegger's turn to Nazism in 1933 as following logically from an indifference, and even hostility, to "otherness" in the premises of his early philosophy.

In The Fragile "We": Ethical Implications of Heidegger's "Being and Time," Lawrence Vogel presents three interpretations of authentic existence—the existentialist, the historicist, and the cosmopolitan—each of which is a plausible version of the personal ideal depicted in Being and Time. He then draws parallels between these interpretations and three moments in the contemporary liberal-communitarian debate over the relationship of the "I" and the "We." His book contributes both to a diagnosis of what there is about Being and Time that invites moral nihilism and to a sense of how fundamental ontology might be recast so that "the other" is accorded an appropriate place in an account of human existence.
[more]
cover of The Genesis of Desire

The Genesis of Desire

Jean-Michel Oughourlian

Michigan State University Press, 2010

We seem to be abandoning the codes that told previous generations who they should love. But now that many of us are free to choose whoever we want, nothing is less certain. The proliferation of divorces and separations reveal a dynamic we would rather not see: others sometimes reject us as passionately as we are attracted to them.
     Our desire makes us sick. The throes of rivalry are at the heart of our attraction to one another. This is the central thesis of Jean-Michel Oughourlian's The Genesis of Desire, where the war of the sexes is finally given a scientific explanation. The discovery of mirror neurons corroborates his ideas, clarifying the phenomena of empathy and the mechanisms of violent reciprocity.
     How can a couple be saved when they have declared war on one another? By helping them realize that desire originates not in the self but in the other. There are strategies that can help, which Dr. Oughourlian has prescribed successfully to his patients. This work, alternating between case studies and more theoretical statements, convincingly defends the possibility that breakups need not be permanent.

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cover of The Genesis of Values

The Genesis of Values

Hans Joas

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Public and intellectual debates have long struggled with the concept of values and the difficulties of defining them. With The Genesis of Values, renowned theorist Hans Joas explores the nature of these difficulties in relation to some of the leading figures of twentieth-century philosophy and social theory: Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Max Scheler, John Dewey, Georg Simmel, Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas. Joas traces how these thinkers came to terms with the idea of values, and then extends beyond them with his own comprehensive theory. Values, Joas suggests, arise in experiences in self-formation and self-transcendence. Only by appreciating the creative nature of human action can we understand how our values arise.
[more]
cover of The Gift of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky

The Gift of Active Empathy

Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky

Alina Wyman

Northwestern University Press, 2016

This innovative study brings the early writings of Mikhail Bakhtin into conversation with Max Scheler and Fyodor Dostoevsky to explore the question of what makes emotional co-experiencing ethically and spiritually productive. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin's well-known concept of the dialogical partner expresses what he sees as the potential of human relationships in Dostoevsky's work. But his earlier reflections on the ethical and aesthetic uses of empathy, in part inspired by Scheler's philosophy, suggest a still more fundamental form of communication that operates as a basis for human togetherness in Dostoevsky. Applying this rich and previously neglected theoretical apparatus in a literary analysis, Wyman examines the obstacles to active empathy in Dostoevsky's fictional world, considers the limitations and excesses of empathy, addresses the problem of frustrated love in The Idiot and Notes from Underground, and provides a fresh interpretation of two of Dostoevsky's most iconic characters, Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov.
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cover of The Good Is Love: The Body and Human Acts in Humanae Vitae and John Paul II

The Good Is Love

The Body and Human Acts in Humanae Vitae and John Paul II

Adrian Reimers

St. Augustine's Press, 2020

John Paul II in his personalist approach to moral questions reaffirmed that as sin offends that which is good, if we truly know what human love is––and that it is good––we would thereby see how certain acts can never be acceptable insofar as they in all cases wound this love. Yet in moral debates surrounding love, sex and contraception Adrian Reimers observes that we are not using this approach and these debates are not advancing the cause of real love. 

Reimers draws upon the encyclical Humanae Vitae and John Paul II’s catechesis known as the theology of the body to respond to the stalled development of moral theology on the issues most crucial to human love and intimacy. “It is time, we are told, for a ‘paradigm shift’ in the Catholic Church’s moral teaching, such shift representing a more pastoral and less dogmatic approach to moral issues,” writes Reimers. His claim that “a paradigm shift in moral theology and philosophy may be valuable––perhaps vital––to scholars who think and write about these sciences and to teachers who communicate moral truth” is not an exhortation to redefine moral truths. Rather, he argues that an approach to contraception, for example, that relies exclusively on natural law is a hackneyed one and often “tedious.”

John Paul II’s series of catechetical addresses known as the theology of the body was originally composed in the 1970s after Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. Albeit derived from the writing of an archbishop and not yet pope, Reimers identifies John Paul II’s perspectives on love, sex and contraception as an essential force behind this so-called paradigm shift in continuity with the profound and unchanging truths set forth in Humanae Vitae. As Reimers states, “Moral truths do not change, even if our ways to understand them improve.”

How, then, is our sense of the goodness or badness of contraception meant to be helped by such a development of thought? Ethics grounded philosophically tends to lean toward legalism in the context of moral actions, says Reimers, as it emphasizes conformity to God’s law and largely overlooks “the relationship between moral behavior and the human person’s ultimate end of beatitude with God.” The important principle of the necessarily two-fold description that natural law gives to sex––namely, as unitive and procreative––must not be the authoritative end of the discussion regarding the moral nature of contraception. In an age where technology has given human beings new power it seems there must be new rules as well, and the conquest of procreative acts changes the human perception of the limitations once associated with harmful acts. Herein lies the importance of John Paul II’s catechesis––the goodness or badness of acts is not just concerned with end of a particular act. As Reimers writes, “If we are to understand the complex relationships among love, marriage, and their sexual expression, we must situate these within the context of the end of the human being.”

A position on contraception and human sexuality cannot be comprehensive without a concept of love properly understood. Human acts must bring us closer to sanctity, not to comfort or possession. Holiness is the perfection of love, and its pursuit aims at ultimate beatitude. This end, the truest love human can know, is the end which ultimately condemns contraception once and for all, as “contracepted sex is contrary to holiness.” Reimers unpacks this sometimes difficult truth in eight chapters, which begin with love and conclude with faithfulness to moral norms and a spirituality of marriage.  

The arguments surrounding contraception and “good sex” seem to have set the grounds for coherently choosing a side rather than to have succeeded in presenting certain human acts as definitively immoral. As Reimers notes, a natural law position on contraception often fails to employ its greatest ally: the reality of authentic human love and “victory” of the individual in one’s sanctity as achieved through that love. This work will reorient the objectives and claims of the moral debate, as well as influence the popular notion of what love is and what it cannot be. It is an aid to scholars, students and study groups, humanists, and those who seek to deepen the sense of love’s highest physical expression. 
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cover of The Good Quit: Mastering the Fine Art of Giving Up

The Good Quit

Mastering the Fine Art of Giving Up

Jeffrey A. Lockwood

University of Wyoming Press, 2026

Quitting is a vital and pervasive phenomenon that shapes our lives. The Good Quit is an enlightening and provocative challenge to the common perceptions around the choice to quit. Rather than offering simplistic how-to advice, scientist-turned-philosopher Jeffrey A. Lockwood makes full use of biological, psychological, and social sciences to unpack what constitutes quitting for the right reasons, at the right time, and in the right way, using both fundamental principles and concrete examples. He explores the full range of ways in which quitting can occur in the human experience, including addictions, careers, diets, games, habits, jobs, politics, relationships, religions, sports, and wars.
 
Masterful quitting contributes to genuine success, but this practice nevertheless has been largely overlooked by scholars, teachers, coaches, and leaders. This book is a three-part exploration. In conceptual terms it asks, Is it really quitting if the decision is reversible, involuntary, or partial? In normative terms, it explores whether quitting must be well-reasoned, -timed, and -enacted to be justifiable. In applicable terms, it emphasizes phronesis, or “practical wisdom,” and contributes to the understanding that what constitutes quitting, and doing so well, is vital to making decisions about whether to persevere or abandon difficult ventures.

Flourishing is more complex than “grit-or-quit” advocates suggest. To thrive, we must come to know why, when, and how to quit. The Good Quit approaches this topic from an expansive and philosophical point of view, making it valuable for anyone contemplating the what, when, why, and how of quitting.
 
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cover of The Great Debate: Nietzsche, Culture, and the Scandinavian Welfare Society

The Great Debate

Nietzsche, Culture, and the Scandinavian Welfare Society

Georg Brandes and Harald Høffding

University of Wisconsin Press, 2024

In 1889, Danish literary critic Georg Brandes published “Aristocratic Radicalism: An Essay on Friedrich Nietzsche,” which transformed the as-yet-unknown German-Swiss philosopher into a European, and ultimately global, phenomenon. The article sparked a furious public debate between Brandes and a fellow Dane, philosopher Harald Høffding, who swiftly issued a rebuttal,  “Democratic Radicalism: An Objection.” What began as a scholarly disagreement over Nietzsche’s philosophy rapidly spiraled into a sprawling contest of competing visions of society’s future, one radically aristocratic and the other radically democratic.

Marking the moment at which the uniquely Nordic concept of social democratic welfare was first contested in the public sphere, this debate provides insights into not only Nietzschean philosophy and its immediate reception but also the foundational concept of modern Scandinavian social, cultural, and political organization. This volume presents, for the first time in any language other than Danish, the debate in its entirety: three essays by Brandes and three by Høffding. A critical introduction by editor and translator William Banks explores the exchange in its context and convincingly argues that the principles contested by the two Danish luminaries still very much resonate in Western society today.
[more]
cover of The Greeks and Us: Essays in Honor of Arthur W. H. Adkins

The Greeks and Us

Essays in Honor of Arthur W. H. Adkins

Edited by Robert B. Louden and Paul Schollmeier

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Arthur W. H. Adkins's writings have sparked debates among a wide range of scholars over the nature of ancient Greek ethics and its relevance to modern times. Demonstrating the breadth of his influence, the essays in this volume reveal how leading classicists, philosophers, legal theorists, and scholars of religion have incorporated Adkins's thought into their own diverse research.

The timely subjects addressed by the contributors include the relation between literature and moral understanding, moral and nonmoral values, and the contemporary meaning of ancient Greek ethics. The volume also includes an essay from the late Adkins himself illustrating his methodology in an analysis of the "Speech of Lysias" in Plato's Phaedrus.

The Greeks and Us will interest all those concerned with how ancient moral values do or do not differ from our own.

Contributors include Arthur W. H. Adkins, Stephanie Nelson, Martha C. Nussbaum, Paul Schollmeier, James Boyd White, Bernard Williams, and Lee Yearley.

Commentaries by Wendy Doniger, Charles M. Gray, David Grene, Robert B. Louden, Richard Posner, and Candace Vogler.
[more]
cover of The Habit of Lying: Sacrificial Studies in Literature, Philosophy, and Fashion Theory

The Habit of Lying

Sacrificial Studies in Literature, Philosophy, and Fashion Theory

John Vignaux Smyth

Duke University Press, 2002

Lying appears to be ubiquitous, what Franz Kafka called "a universal principle”; yet, despite a number of recent books on the subject, it has been given comparatively little genuinely systematic attention by philosophers, social scientists, or even literary theorists. In The Habit of Lying John Vignaux Smyth examines three forms of falsification—lying, concealment, and fiction—and makes a strong critique of traditional approaches to each of them, and, above all, to the relations among them.
With recourse to Rene Girard, Paul de Man, Theodor Adorno, Leo Strauss, and other theoreticians not usually considered together, Smyth arrives at some surprising conclusions about the connections between lying, mimesis, sacrifice, sadomasochism, and the sacred, among other central subjects. Arguing that the relation between lying and truthtelling has been characterized in the West by sharply sacrificial features, he begins with a critique of the philosophies of lying espoused by Kant and Sissela Bok, then concludes that the problem of truth and lies leads to the further problem of the relation between law and arbitrariness as well as to the relation between rationality and unanimity. Constructively criticizing the work of such philosophers as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, and Nelson Goodman, Smyth shows how these problems occur comparably in fiction theory and how Paul de Man’s definition of fiction as arbitrariness finds confirmation in analytic philosophy. Through the novels of Defoe, Stendhal, and Beckett—with topics ranging from Defoe’s treatment of lies, fiction, and obscenity to Beckett’s treatment of the anus and the sacred—Smyth demonstrates how these texts generalize the issues of mendacity, concealment, and sacrificial arbitrariness in Girard’s sense to almost every aspect of experience, fiction theory, and cultural life. The final section of the book, taking its cue from Shakespeare, elaborates a sacrificial view of the history of fashion and dress concealment.
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cover of The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality

The Heart Is a Little to the Left

Essays on Public Morality

William Sloane Coffin

Dartmouth College Press, 2011

William Sloane Coffin offers here a powerful antidote to the politics of the religious right with a clarion call to passive intellectuals and dispirited liberals to reenter the fray with an unabashedly Christian view of social justice. Refusing to cede the battlefield of morality to conservatives, he argues that “compassion demands confrontation,” as he considers such topics as homophobia, diversity, nuclear weapons, and civil discourse. Coffin became famous while chaplain at Yale in the 1960s for his active opposition to the Vietnam War. Jailed as a civil rights “Freedom Rider,” indicted by the government in the Benjamin Spock conspiracy trial, he attained popular immortality as Reverend Sloan in the Doonesbury comic strip. The seven pieces collected here are peppered with memorable aphorisms and pithy, political one-liners meant to turn bitterness to anger and anger to action.
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cover of The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics

The Heidegger Case

On Philosophy and Politics

edited by Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis

Temple University Press, 1992

"[These] essays together form an extraordinary response, and radical but not self-righteous challenge, to Heidegger's unambiguous complicity with Hitler and Nazism....This book will provoke intense dialogue and controversy about issues which, for too long, too many philosophers have chosen either to gloss over or ignore." --Ronald E. Santoni The relation between Martin Heidegger's philosophical thought and his political commitment has been widely discussed in recent years, following the publication of Victor Farías's controversial study, Heidegger and Nazism, published in this country by Temple University Press. The Heidegger Case is a collection of original essays, by both American and European philosophers, on issues raised by Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis. The contributors consider such matters as the relationship between Heidegger's philosophical theories and his public statements and activities, the ways in which his ideas on social and political life compare with those of other philosophers, and the role of philosophy with respect to politics.
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cover of The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings

The Holocaust

Theoretical Readings

Levi, Neil

Rutgers University Press, 2003

The first anthology to address the relationship between the events of the Nazi genocide and the intellectual concerns of contemporary literary and cultural theory in one substantial and indispensable volume.

This agenda-setting reader brings together both classic and new writings to demonstrate how concerns arising from the Nazi genocide shaped contemporary literary and cultural theory. Wide in its thematic scope, it covers such vital questions as:
- Authenticity and experience
- Memory and trauma
- Historiography and the philosophy of history
- Fascism and Nazi anti-Semitism
- Representation and identity formation
- Race, gender, and genocide
- Implications of the Holocaust for theories of the unconscious, ethics, politics, and aesthetics

The readings, which are fully contextualized by a general introduction, section introductions, and bibliographical notes, represent the work of many influential writers and theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman, Walter Benjamin, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Saul Friedlander, Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Langer, Emmanuel Levinas, Primo Levi, Jean-François Lyotard, Hayden White, and James E. Young. This multidisciplinary anthology will be welcomed by students and scholars of the Holocaust.

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cover of The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age

The Imperative of Responsibility

In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age

Hans Jonas

University of Chicago Press, 1984

A classic work of ethical philosophy that explores our options in an age of devatasting technological change

Hans Jonas here rethinks the foundations of ethics in light of the awesome transformations wrought by modern technology: the threat of nuclear war, ecological ravage, genetic engineering, and the like. Though informed by a deep reverence for human life, Jonas's ethics is grounded not in religion but in metaphysics, in a secular doctrine that makes explicit man's duties toward himself, his posterity, and the environment. Jonas offers an assessment of practical goals under present circumstances, ending with a critique of modern utopianism.
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cover of The Kingdom Suffereth Violence: The Machiavelli / Erasmus / More Correspondence and Other Unpublished Documents

The Kingdom Suffereth Violence

The Machiavelli / Erasmus / More Correspondence and Other Unpublished Documents

Philippe Bénéton

St. Augustine's Press, 2012

[more]
cover of The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of Their Lives

The Last Walk

Reflections on Our Pets at the End of Their Lives

Jessica Pierce

University of Chicago Press, 2012

From the moment when we first open our homes—and our hearts—to a new pet, we know that one day we will have to watch this beloved animal age and die. The pain of that eventual separation is the cruel corollary to the love we share with them, and most of us deal with it by simply ignoring its inevitability.
 
With The Last Walk, Jessica Pierce makes a forceful case that our pets, and the love we bear them, deserve better. Drawing on the moving story of the last year of the life of her own treasured dog, Ody, she presents an in-depth exploration of the practical, medical, and moral issues that trouble pet owners confronted with the decline and death of their companion animals. Pierce combines heart-wrenching personal stories, interviews, and scientific research to consider a wide range of questions about animal aging, end-of-life care, and death. She tackles such vexing questions as whether animals are aware of death, whether they're feeling pain, and if and when euthanasia is appropriate. Given what we know and can learn, how should we best honor the lives of our pets, both while they live and after they have left us?         

The product of a lifetime of loving pets, studying philosophy, and collaborating with scientists at the forefront of the study of animal behavior and cognition, The Last Walk asks—and answers—the toughest questions pet owners face. The result is informative, moving, and consoling in equal parts; no pet lover should miss it.
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cover of The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 7, 1925 - 1953: 1932, Ethics

The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 7, 1925 - 1953

1932, Ethics

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Introduction by Abraham Edel and Elizabeth Flower

This seventh volume provides an au­thoritative edition of Dewey and James H. Tufts’ 1932 Ethics.

Dewey and Tufts state that the book’s aim is: “To induce a habit of thoughtful consideration, of envisaging the full meaning and consequences of individual conduct and social policies,” insisting throughout that ethics must be con­stantly concerned with the changing problems of daily life.

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cover of The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality

The Life Worth Living

Disability, Pain, and Morality

Joel Michael Reynolds

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A philosophical challenge to the ableist conflation of disability and pain

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said: “let there be a law that no deformed child shall live.” This idea is alive and well today. During the past century, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the United States can forcibly sterilize intellectually disabled women and philosopher Peter Singer argued for the right of parents to euthanize certain cognitively disabled infants. The Life Worth Living explores how and why such arguments persist by investigating the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy.

Joel Michael Reynolds argues that this history demonstrates a fundamental mischaracterization of the meaning of disability, thanks to the conflation of lived experiences of disability with those of pain and suffering. Building on decades of activism and scholarship in the field, Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision of what an anti-ableist moral future requires.

The Life Worth Living is the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of the history of moral philosophy and phenomenology, and it demonstrates how lived experiences of disability demand a far richer account of human flourishing, embodiment, community, and politics in philosophical inquiry and beyond.

Accessibility features: Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism

The Matter of Evil

From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism

Drew M. Dalton

Northwestern University Press, 2024

A provocative and entirely new account of ethical reasoning that reconceives the traditional understanding of ethical action negatively

In this radical reconsideration of ethical reasoning in contemporary European philosophy, Drew M. Dalton makes the case for an absolutely grounded account of ethical normativity developed from a scientifically informed and purely materialistic metaphysics. Expanding on speculative realist arguments, Dalton argues that the limits placed on the nature of ethical judgments by Kant’s critique can be overcome through a moral evaluation of the laws of nature—specifically, the entropic principle that undergirds the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. In order to extract a moral meaning from this simple material fact, Dalton scrutinizes the presumptions of classical accounts and traditional understandings of good and evil within the history of Western philosophy and ultimately asserts that ethical normativity can be reestablished absolutely without reverting to dogmatism.

By overturning our assumptions about the nature and value of reality, The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism presents a provocative new model of ethical responsibility that is both logically justifiable and scientifically sound. Dalton argues for “ethical pessimism,” a position previously marginalized in the West, as a means to cultivate an account of ethical responsibility and political activism that takes seriously the unbecoming of being and the moral horror of existence.
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cover of The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 3, 1899 - 1924: Journal Articles, Book Reviews, and Miscellany in the 1903-1906 Period

The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 3, 1899 - 1924

Journal Articles, Book Reviews, and Miscellany in the 1903-1906 Period

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Spanning the crucial years of Dewey’s move from the University of Chicago to Columbia University, Volume 3 col­lects thirty-six essays and reviews pub­lished at the very time Dewey deter­mined that his professional future would lie in the field of philosophy. After resigning from Chicago, Dewey seriously considered a career in univer­sity administration before finally decid­ing to accept a professorship in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia, where he was to remain the rest of his professional life.
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cover of The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 4, 1899 - 1924: Journal Articles and Book Reviews in the 1907-1909 Period, and The Pragmatic Movement of Contemporary Thought and Moral Principles in Education

The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 4, 1899 - 1924

Journal Articles and Book Reviews in the 1907-1909 Period, and The Pragmatic Movement of Contemporary Thought and Moral Principles in Education

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

By 1907, the first of the three years em­braced by Volume 4, Dewey had aban­doned thoughts of a possible career in the administration of higher education and was firmly established as a leading member of the Department of Phi­losophy at Columbia. As Lewis Hahn points out in his Introduction, these were “very productive years for Dewey. In addition to numerous lectures and speaking engagements and participa­tion in professional meetings, he pub­lished fifteen or so substantial articles, almost as many shorter things, a syl­labus on The Pragmatic Movement of Contemporary Thought, a monograph on Moral Principles in Education, and, with J. H. Tufts, the first edition of a very popular textbook, Ethics.”
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cover of The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 5, 1899-1924: Ethics, 1908

The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 5, 1899-1924

Ethics, 1908

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Thisfifth volume of the Middle Works contains Ethics by John Dewey and his former colleague at the University of Michigan, James H. Tufts, which ap­peared as one of the last in the Holt American Science series of textbooks. Within some six months after publica­tion, Ethics was adopted as a textbook by thirty colleges. The book continued to be extremely popular and widely used, and was reprinted twenty-five times before both authors completely revised their respective parts for the new 1932edition.

Up to the time Ethics was published, Dewey’s approach to ethics was known primarily from two short publications that were developed for use by his classes at the University of Michigan: Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891)and The Study of Ethics: A Syl­labus (1894). Charles Stevenson notes in his Introduction to the present edition that Ethics afforded Dewey an opportu­nity to preserve and enrich the content of those earlier works and at the same time to expound his position in a more systematic manner.

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cover of The Moral Austerity of Environmental Decision Making: Sustainability, Democracy, and Normative Argument in Policy and Law

The Moral Austerity of Environmental Decision Making

Sustainability, Democracy, and Normative Argument in Policy and Law

John Martin Gillroy and Joe Bowersox, eds.

Duke University Press, 2002

In The Moral Austerity of Environmental Decision Making a group of prominent environmental ethicists, policy analysts, political theorists, and legal experts challenges the dominating influence of market principles and assumptions on the formulation of environmental policy. Emphasizing the concept of sustainability and the centrality of moral deliberation to democracy, they examine the possibilities for a wider variety of moral principles to play an active role in defining “good” environmental decisions. If environmental policy is to be responsible to humanity and to nature in the twenty-first century, they argue, it is imperative that the discourse acknowledge and integrate additional normative assumptions and principles other than those endorsed by the market paradigm.
The contributors search for these assumptions and principles in short arguments and debates over the role of science, social justice, instrumental value, and intrinsic value in contemporary environmental policy. In their discussion of moral alternatives to enrich environmental decision making and in their search for a less austere and more robust role for normative discourse in practical policy making, they analyze a series of original case studies that deal with environmental sustainability and natural resources policy including pollution, land use, environmental law, globalism, and public lands. The unique structure of the book—which features the core contributors responding in a discourse format to the central chapters’ essays and debates—helps to highlight the role personal and public values play in democratic decision making generally and in the field of environmental politics specifically.

Contributors. Joe Bowersox, David Brower, Susan Buck, Celia Campbell-Mohn, John Martin Gillroy, Joel Kassiola, Jan Laitos, William Lowry, Bryan Norton, Robert Paehlke, Barry G. Rabe, Mark Sagoff, Anna K. Schwab, Bob Pepperman Taylor, Jonathan Wiener

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