This book explores many of the issues that arise when we consider persons who are in pain, who are suffering, and who are nearing the end of life. Suffering provokes us into a journey toward discovering who we are and forces us to rethink many of the views we hold about ourselves.

This book makes compassionate caring and connectedness the central themes. Imbedded in the human psyche we find a deep yearning for connection. This book explores the many roadblocks that human beings put in the way of a healthy and respectful dialogue with each other, with nature, and with the universe. It also cites numerous examples from literature, philosophy, and society of a reawakening sense of connectedness.

The book aims to present the wisdom of sages, great thinkers, renowned writers, and philosophers, of many countries and time periods, in their own words, regarding life. The book also aims to place the numerous quotations from these sources in a structured organization, with introductory and explanatory comments and comparisons.
Main Topics or Fields - See Organization or Principal Parts.

This volume contains ten chapters, each of which takes up a different question in contemporary moral or political philosophy. The volume has three parts: meta-ethics, issues in freedom and autonomy, and contemporary political philosophy. In the meta-ethical section, the chapters address issues concerning acts and their value, the plausibility of aggregation and counting with respect to the value of human lives, and the role of moral character in causing and explaining moral behavior. In the second section, the chapters take up questions about the connection between moral imagination and a...

This book defends morality against the critiques of egoims, subjectivism, and relativism. It argues that we can and should construe some moral standards as objective and that justice and self-development are the cornerstones of healthy morality. Opening with a dialogue meant to tease and provoke the reader, the book's subsequent chapters treat misconceptions about morality, the possibility of unselfish action, the nature of free will and moral responsibility, and the identity of moral right and wrong.

What is intrinsic value? What is the origin of value? Are people always superior to nature? This book is a philosophical analysis of the human relationship to the non-human world. It is a pioneering study of the philosophy of nature-conservation in relation to the discussion of intrinsic value. Vilkka develops a naturalistic or naturocentric theory of value that is based on ethical extensionism and pluralism. Vilkka analyzes natural values and environmental attitudes: zoocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. This book forms a taxonomy for nature having intrinsic value. The theory of...

Traditionally understood as pre-critical, even pre-rational, mythical thought has in fact played a critical role in post-Enlightenment intellectual history. Modernists in philosophy and literature have used the depictive rationality of myth to disclose, in self-reflective ways, the limits of discursive sense-making in various domains of human experience. In so doing, they have effectively furthered, without resort to analytical abstractions, the epistemological critique of reason begun during the Enlightenment. Stambovsky illustrates four widely diverse examples of this critical form...

This book is an original synthesis of four elements: (1) the phenomenology of value, (2) caring, (3) the moral imagination, and (4) Kant's formula of humanity. The striking result is an ethics of caring that develops our shared humanity. The probing analysis and pungent argument are assisted by imaginative forms of dialogue, narration, and parable. This lively contribution to our ethical fulfillment concludes with a case for student-centered education that is democratic, creative and caring.