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Author: S. Slote
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2013-10-23
Total Pages: 205
ISBN-13: 1137364122
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The first book-length treatment of James Joyce's work through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought, Slote argues that the range of styles Joyce deploys has an ethical dimension. This intersection raises questions of epistemology, aesthetics, and the construction of the 'Modern' and will appeal to literary and philosophy scholars.
Author: Richard Joyce
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2007-08-24
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 0262263254
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.
Author: Thomas Stern
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-01-02
Total Pages: 131
ISBN-13: 110858750X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This Element explains Nietzsche's ethics in his late works, from 1886 onwards. The first three sections explain the basics of his ethical theory – its context and presuppositions, its scope and its central tension. The next three sections explore Nietzsche's goals in writing a history of Christian morality (On the Genealogy of Morality), the content of that history, and whether he achieves his goals. The last two sections take a broader look, respectively, at Nietzsche's wider philosophy in light of his ethics and at the prospects for a Nietzschean ethics after Nietzsche.
Author: Richard Joyce
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2009-12-01
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9048133394
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →What kind of properties are moral qualities, such as rightness, badness, etc? Some ethicists doubt that there are any such properties; they maintain that thinking that something is morally wrong (for example) is comparable to thinking that something is a unicorn or a ghost. These "moral error theorists" argue that the world simply does not contain the kind of properties or objects necessary to render our moral judgments true. This radical form of moral skepticism was championed by the philosopher John Mackie (1917-1981). This anthology is a collection of philosophical essays critically examining Mackie’s view.
Author: Christa Davis Acampora
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-07-06
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 0226821013
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A brilliant exploration of a significant and understudied aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In this groundbreaking work, Christa Davis Acampora offers a profound rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s crucial notion of the agon. Analyzing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources and synthesizing decades of Nietzsche scholarship, she shows how the agon, or contest, organized core areas of Nietzsche’s philosophy, providing a new appreciation of the subtleties of his notorious views about power. By focusing so intensely on this particular guiding interest, she offers an exciting, original vantage from which to view this iconic thinker: Contesting Nietzsche. Though existence—viewed through the lens of Nietzsche’s agon—is fraught with struggle, Acampora illuminates what Nietzsche recognized as the agon’s generative benefits. It imbues the human experience with significance, meaning, and value. Analyzing Nietzsche’s elaborations of agonism—his remarks on types of contests, qualities of contestants, and the conditions in which either may thrive or deteriorate—she demonstrates how much the agon shaped his philosophical projects and critical assessments of others. The agon led him from one set of concerns to the next, from aesthetics to metaphysics to ethics to psychology, via Homer, Socrates, Saint Paul, and Wagner. In showing how one obsession catalyzed so many diverse interests, Contesting Nietzsche sheds fundamentally new light on some of this philosopher’s most difficult and paradoxical ideas.
Author: Lee Oser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2007-01-11
Total Pages: 96
ISBN-13: 113946289X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →What was the ethical perspective of modernist literature? How did Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett represent ethical issues and develop their moral ideas? Lee Oser argues that thinking about human nature restores a perspective on modernist literature that has been lost. He offers detailed discussions of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics to illuminate close readings of major modernist texts. For Oser, the reception of Aristotle is crucial to the modernist moral project, which he defines as the effort to transform human nature through the use of art. Exploring the origins of that project, its success in modernism, its critical heirs, and its possible future, The Ethics of Modernism brings a fresh perspective on modernist literature and its interaction with ethical strands of philosophy. It offers many new insights to scholars of twentieth-century literature as well as intellectual historians.
Author: Peter Berkowitz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1996-09-01
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 067425239X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Once regarded as a conservative critic of culture, then enlisted by the court theoreticians of Nazism, Nietzsche has come to be revered by postmodern thinkers as one of their founding fathers, a prophet of human liberation who revealed the perspectival character of all knowledge and broke radically with traditional forms of morality and philosophy. In Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, Peter Berkowitz challenges this new orthodoxy, asserting that it produces a one-dimensional picture of Nietzsche's philosophical explorations and passes by much of what is provocative and problematic in his thought. Berkowitz argues that Nietzsche's thought is rooted in extreme and conflicting opinions about metaphysics and human nature. Discovering a deep unity in Nietzsche's work by exploring the structure and argumentative movement of a wide range of his books, Berkowitz shows that Nietzsche is a moral and political philosopher in the Socratic sense whose governing question is, "What is the best life?" Nietzsche, Berkowitz argues, puts forward a severe and aristocratic ethics, an ethics of creativity, that demands that the few human beings who are capable acquire a fundamental understanding of and attain total mastery over the world. Following the path of Nietzsche's thought, Berkowitz shows that this mastery, which represents a suprapolitical form of rule and entails a radical denigration of political life, is, from Nietzsche's own perspective, neither desirable nor attainable. Out of the colorful and richly textured fabric of Nietzsche's books, Peter Berkowitz weaves an interpretation of Nietzsche's achievement that is at once respectful and skeptical, an interpretation that brings out the love of truth, the courage, and the yearning for the good that mark Nietzsche's magisterial effort to live an examined life by giving an account of the best life.
Author: Brian Leiter
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 2007-02-15
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 0191515930
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Nietzsche was surprisingly neglected by most English-language moral philosophers until recently. This volume capitalizes on a growth of interest in Nietzsche's work on morality from two sides - from scholars of the history of philosophy and from contributors to current debates on ethical theory. In eleven new essays, leading philosophers aim both to advance philosophical understanding of Nietzsche's ethical views - his normative and meta-ethics, his moral psychology, his views on free will and the nature of the self - and to make Nietzsche a live participant in contemporary debates in ethics and cognate fields.
Author: Simon May
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 1999-12-02
Total Pages: 230
ISBN-13: 0191543969
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Simon May presents a fresh and wide-ranging critique of Nietzsche's famous attack on traditional morality, and of his controversial ethics of 'life-enhancement'. He reveals Nietzsche as both revolutionary and conservative–as one who repudiates traditional 'moral' conceptions of God, guilt, asceticism, pity, and truthfulness, and yet retains a demanding ethics of discipline, conscience, 'self-creation', generosity, and honesty. In particular, May shows how Nietzsche rejects truthfulness as an unconditional value and yet celebrates it as one of his own highest values, whose worth is determined by who is pursuing it, for what end, and when in their lives. May is strongly critical of various aspects of Nietzsche's thought–his self-defeating conception of justice, his assumption that 'life-enhancement' necessarily demands world-affirmation, his ambition to de-deify the world, and the impossible and undesirable autonomy of the Übermensch. But Nietzsche is shown to offer modernity key elements of a coherent ethic, and to provide moral philosophy with important tools for reassessing some of its most cherished values and concepts. May's book will be illuminating not just for scholars and students of Nietzsche, in philosophy, literature, and history of ideas, but for anyone interested in current debates about ethics and modernity.
Author: Peter Fitzsimons
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2007-01-01
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9087903529
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The book explores the development of Nietzsche’s philosophy and its application to the problems of education, disturbing traditional liberal and democratic accounts of the relationship between individual and society.
