Author: Matthew Vest Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1666747181 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
Ethics Lost in Modernity: Reflections on Wittgenstein and Bioethics turns to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a guide to understand the immense success—yet great danger—of bioethics. Matthew Vest traces the story of bioethics since its inception in the late 1960s as a way to uncover a number of hidden assumptions within modern ethics that relies upon scientific theorizing as the fundamental way of thinking. Autonomy and utilitarianism, in particular, are two nearly unquestioned goals of scientific theorizing that are easily accessible, but at what cost? Vest argues that such an ethics enacts a thin moral calculation that runs the risk of enslaving ethics to scientism. Far from the depth of religious ethos and practices of virtue, modern ethics is lost amidst thin ethical theories, enacting a language game that instrumentalizes ethics in service of technological, bureaucratic, and professional end goals. He proposes that true moral living is far from anti–science, but rather is envisioned best when ethics and science are balanced with keen insights from ancient sacred cosmology.
Author: Zygmunt Bauman Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 074566962X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 224
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.
Author: Jill Kraye Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 1402030010 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 344
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.
Author: Charles Larmore Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521497725 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
Arguing against recent attempts to return to the virtue-centered perspective of ancient Greek ethics, these essays explore the problem of the relation between moral philosophy and modernity by studying the differences between ancient and modern ethics.
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316820246 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages :
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.
Author: Richard Münch Publisher: Legacies of Social Thought Series ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Based on intensive, long-term study, this comparative book traces the role of ethics in the formation of modernity in four Western nations (the US, Britain, France, and Germany). M nch's analysis spans several centuries of historical and political development. While ethics has played a clear role in the West's transition to modernity, he shows that its role has varied substantially and that it has influenced the development of each nation's political and social institutions. The book begins with an assessment of the ethics of the West in contrast with the East. M nch then looks at the formation of the ethics of modernity from ancient Judaism to ascetic Protestantism and modern secularized culture. The Ethics of Modernity builds a systematic reconstruction of the ethical formation of modernity in its different stages and variations, concluding with current globalization trends.
Author: Elsa Högberg Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350022721 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
Revisiting Virginia Woolf's most experimental novels, Elsa Högberg explores how Woolf's writing prompts us to re-examine the meaning of intimacy. In Högberg's readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, intimacy is revealed to inhere not just in close relations with the ones we know and love, but primarily within those unsettling encounters which suspend our comfortable sense of ourselves as separate from others and the world around us. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy locates this radical notion of intimacy at the heart of Woolf's introspective, modernist poetics as well as her ethical and political resistance to violence, aggressive nationalism and fascism. Engaging contemporary theory – particularly the more recent works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – it reads Woolf as a writer and ethical thinker whose vital contribution to the modernist scene of inter-war Britain is strikingly relevant to critical debates around intimacy, affect, violence and vulnerability in our own time.
Author: Hanna J. Lucas Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1666758078 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 283
Book Description
This book offers a theological vision of learning informed by the mystagogical homilies of Ambrose of Milan, Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. In dialogue with these four mystagogues, Hanna Lucas walks through the rites and liturgy surrounding baptism and the eucharist in order to establish a theological epistemology that sees knowledge as part of the “capacitation” of our nature for heavenly mysteries and union with God. The sacraments of initiation teach us that even the mundane aspects of knowledge, including the rudiments of matter and sensation, fit into a larger divine gift of capacitation. This book offers a holistic and integrated theory of knowledge that envisions one all-encompassing divine pedagogy that orients toward union with God. This union is experienced fully in the eschaton, but it breaks into time through the sacraments of the church, and it echoes down through the ordinary modes of knowing we encounter in daily life. Mundane knowledge beckons the knower to become capable of a sublime intelligence: to become capable of union with the divine. This integrative, unitive, and eschatologically oriented vision of knowledge stands in stark contrast to modern and postmodern epistemologies. Sensing the Sacred positions mystagogy as a timely remedy for the “incapacitations” that modernity offers us.
Author: Steven E. Knepper Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 166673845X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
The Irish philosopher William Desmond is one of the most compelling and adventurous Christian thinkers of our time. The essays gathered here undertake a journey through the Bible with Desmond that ranges across biblical theology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, political theory, and literary studies. Some of the essays examine the place of the Bible in Desmond's thought, considering his readings of the creation, the Abraham cycle, and the Beatitudes. Other essays bring Desmond's ideas to bear on broad questions that emerge from the Bible about philosophy and revelation, exegesis, theopoetics, eschatology, and tyranny. Still others bring Desmond into conversation with influential philosophers who engage (or conspicuously do not engage) the Bible, such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Tillich. Together, these essays show the rich possibilities of approaching the Bible with Desmond. All take their bearings from Desmond's "metaxological" approach, which does not seek to claim the final word, which attends to the text rather than simply imposing on it, and which allows for an ongoing dialogue. / Contributors: Ryan G. Duns, SJ / Caitlin Smith Gilson / Joseph K. Gordon / William Christian Hackett / Steven E. Knepper / Renee Kohler-Ryan / Andrew Kuiper / Brendan Thomas Sammon / Terence Sweeney / Ethan Vanderleek / Erik van Versendaal / Robert Wyllie
Author: Ross Poole Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134959664 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
Ross Poole displays the social content of the various conceptions of morality at work in contemporary society, and casts a strikingly fresh light on such fundamental problems as the place of reason in ethics, moral objectivity and the distinction between duty and virtue. The book provides a critical account of the moral theories of a number of major philosophers, including Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Habermas, Rawls, Gewirth and MacIntyre. It also presents a systematic critique of three of the most significant responses to modernity: liberalism, nationalism and nihilism. It takes seriously the suggestion that men and women are subject to different conceptions of morality, and places the issue of gender at the centre of moral philosophy. Poole has written a valuable addition to the Ideas series.
Author: Matthew Vest
Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Author: Jill Kraye
Author: Charles Larmore
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Author: Richard Münch
Author: Elsa Högberg
Author: Hanna J. Lucas
Author: Steven E. Knepper
Author: Ross Poole