Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Ethics & Moral Philosophy

John Dewey (1859-1952), hailed during his lifetime as "America s Philosopher," is now recognized as one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century. His critical work ranged more broadly than that of either of his contemporaries, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and he anticipated by several decades some of their most trenchant insights. Dewey s ground breaking contributions to philosophy, psychology, and educational theory continue to animate research on the cutting edges of those fields.
The twelve original interpretive essays included here locate Dewey s major works...

..". an important contribution to environmental philosophy.... includes provocative discussions of institutional and systemic violence, indigenous resistance to 'development, ' the land ethic, deep ecology, ecofeminism, women's ecological knowledge, Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism, Berry's ideas about 'principled engagement in community, ' wilderness advocacy, and the need for an attachment to place." -Choice

" T]his is a very important book, raising serious questions for development theorists and environmentalists alike." -Boston Book Review

When Indian centenarian...

While examining the important role of imagination in making moral judgments, John Dewey and Moral Imagination focuses new attention on the relationship between American pragmatism and ethics. Steven Fesmire takes up threads of Dewey's thought that have been largely unexplored and elaborates pragmatism's distinctive contribution to understandings of moral experience, inquiry, and judgment. Building on two Deweyan notions--that moral character, belief, and reasoning are part of a social and historical context and that moral deliberation is an imaginative, dramatic rehearsal of...

"An important contribution to studies of eighteenth-century culture and to literary history and theory and for those with an interest in horror, sentimentality, the invention of the modern individual, and ethics of 'the human.'"
-Daniel Cottom, David A. Burr Chair of Letters, University of Oklahoma

Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman investigates the fascination with joyful malice in eighteenth-century Europe and how this obsession helped inform the very meaning of humanity. Steintrager reveals how the understanding of cruelty moved from an inexplicable, apparently...

What does American pragmatism contribute to contemporary debates about human-animal relationships? Does it acknowledge our connections to all living things? Does it bring us closer to an ethical treatment of all animals? What about hunting, vegetarianism, animal experimentation, and the welfare of farm animals? While questions about human relations with animals have been with us for millennia, there has been a marked rise in public awareness about animal issues--even McDonald's advertises that they use humanely treated animals as food sources. In Animal Pragmatism, 12 lively and...

Living with Indifference is about the dimension of life that is utterly neutral, without care, feeling, or personality. In this provocative work that is anything but indifferent, Charles E. Scott explores the ways people have spoken and thought about indifference. Exploring topics such as time, chance, beauty, imagination, violence, and virtue, Scott shows how affirming indifference can be beneficial, and how destructive consequences can occur when we deny it. Scott's preoccupation with indifference issues a demand for focused attention in connection with personal values, ethics, and...

Any glance at the contemporary history of the world shows that the problem of evil is a central concern for people everywhere. In the last few years, terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, and ethnic and religious wars have only emphasized humanity's seemingly insatiable capacity for violence. In Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil, Robin May Schott brings an international group of contemporary feminist philosophers into debates on evil and terrorism. The invaluable essays collected here consider gender-specific evils such as the Salem witch trials, women's suffering during the...

" Cantor provides] both a cogent and provocative text and prodigious references." --The New England Journal of Medicine

"Cantor develops a careful and accessible ethic of autonomy and dignity regarding forgoing life-prolonging medical treatment... " --Ethics

"A thoughtful, informative and sensitive text... " --European Medical Journal

"Professor Cantor of Rutgers University School of Law has created a scholarly and sophisticated, yet quite accessible, legal analysis of the subject of advance directives... detailed, exhaustively referenced... " --The Florida Bar...

For 170 years, Harriet Taylor Mill has been presented as a footnote in John Stuart Mill s life. This volume gives her a separate voice. Readers may assess for themselves the importance and influence of her ideas on "women s" issues such as marriage and divorce, education, domestic violence, and suffrage. And they will note the overlap of her ideas on ethics, religion, arts, and socialism, written in the 1830s, with her more famous husband s works, published 25 years later.

In Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion, Thomas Hibbs recovers the notion of practice to develop a more descriptive account of human action and knowing, grounded in the venerable vocabulary of virtue and vice. Drawing on Aquinas, who believed that all good works originate from virtue, Hibbs postulates how epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and theology combine into a set of contemporary philosophical practices that remain open to metaphysics. Hibbs brings Aquinas into conversation with analytic and Continental philosophy and suggests how a more nuanced appreciation of his thought...

Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including the infamous proposition, "the Woman does not exist," constituted a revision of his earlier work on "the ethics of psychoanalysis." In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become the key term in his ethics. To trace the link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take the negative proposition about the woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's...

Many philosophers believe that normative ethics is in principle independent of psychology. By contrast, the authors of these essays explore the interconnections between psychology and moral theory. They investigate the psychological constraints on realizable ethical ideals and articulate the psychological assumptions behind traditional ethics. They also examine the ways in which the basic architecture of the mind, core emotions, patterns of individual development, social psychology, and the limits on human capacities for rational deliberation affect morality.

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...

Why does truth matter when politicians so easily sidestep it and intellectuals scorn it as irrelevant? Why be concerned over an abstract idea like truth when something that isn't true -- for example, a report of Iraq's attempting to buy materials for nuclear weapons -- gets the desired result: the invasion of Iraq? In this engaging and spirited book, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. Lynch explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is. "We need to think our way past our confusion...