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Publisher Description
This book argues that everything important about Kant's moral philosophy emerges from common human experience of the conflict between happiness and morality.
Julian Wuerth offers a radically new interpretation of major themes in Kant's philosophy. He explores Kant's ontology of the mind, his transcendental idealism, his account of the mind's powers, and his theory of action, and goes on to develop an original, moral realist account of Kant's ethics.
Anne Margaret Baxley offers a systematic interpretation of Kant's theory of virtue, whose most distinctive features have not been properly understood. She explores the rich moral psychology in Kant's later and less widely read works on ethics, and argues that the key to understanding his account of virtue is the concept of autocracy, a form of moral self-government in which reason rules over sensibility. Although certain aspects of Kant's theory bear comparison to more familiar Aristotelian claims about virtue, Baxley contends that its most important aspects combine to produce something different - a distinctively modern, egalitarian conception of virtue which is an important and overlooked alternative to the more traditional Greek views which have dominated contemporary virtue ethics.
In this book, Professor Jeanine Grenberg defends the idea that Kant's virtue theory is best understood as a system of eudaemonism, indeed, as a distinctive form of eudaemonism that makes it preferable to other forms of it: a system of what she calls Deontological Eudaemonism. In Deontological Eudaemonism, one achieves happiness both rationally conceived (as non-felt pleasure in the virtually unimpeded harmonious activity of one's will and choice) and empirically conceived (as pleasurable fulfilment of one's desires) only via authentic commitment to and fulfilment of what is demanded of all rational beings: making persons as such one's end in all things. To tell this story of Deontological Eu...
Morality has traditionally been understood to be tied to certain metaphysical beliefs: notably, in the freedom of human persons (to choose right or wrong courses of action), in a god (or gods) who serve(s) as judge(s) of moral character, and in an afterlife as the locus of a “final judgment” on individual behavior. Some scholars read the history of moral philosophy as a gradual disentangling of our moral commitments from such beliefs. Kant is often given an important place in their narratives, despite the fact that Kant himself asserts that some of such beliefs are necessary (necessary, at least, from the practical point of view). Many contemporary neo-Kantian moral philosophers have emb...
Philosophers, anthropologists and biologists have long puzzled over the question of human nature. In this lucid and wide-ranging introduction to Kant's philosophy of human nature - which is essential for understanding his thought as a whole - Patrick Frierson assesses Kant's theories and examines his critics.
This book brings a variety of theological resources to bear on the now widespread effort to put humility in its proper place. In recent years, an assortment of thinkers have offered competing evaluations of humility, so that its moral status is now more contentious than ever. Like all accounts of humility, the one advanced in this study has to do with the proper handling of human limits. What early Christian resources offer, and what discussions of the issue since the eighteenth century have often overlooked, is an account of the ways in which human limits are permeable, superable and open to modification because of the working of divine grace. This notion is especially relevant for a renewed vision of intellectual humility-the primary aim of the project-but the study will also suggest the significance of the argument for ameliorating contemporary concerns about humility's generally adverse effects.
While humility is not especially valued in modern Western culture, Jennifer Clement argues here, it is central to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of Christian faith and behavior, and is vital to early modern concepts of the self. As this study shows, early modern literary engagements with humility link it to self-knowledge through the practice of right reading, and make humility foundational to any proper understanding of human agency. Yet humility has received little critical interest, and has often been misunderstood as a false virtue that engenders only self-abjection. This study offers an overview of various ways in which humility is discussed, deployed, or resisted in early modern texts ranging from the explicitly religious and autobiographical prose of Katherine Parr and John Donne, to the more politically motivated prose of Queen Elizabeth I and the seventeenth-century reformer and radical Thomas Tryon. As part of the wider 'turn to religion' in early modern studies, this study seeks to complicate our understanding of a mainstream early modern virtue, and to problematize a mode of critical analysis that assumes agency is always defined by resistance.
In Kant's Human Being, Robert B. Louden continues and deepens avenues of research first initiated in his highly acclaimed book, Kant's Impure Ethics. Drawing on a wide variety of both published and unpublished works spanning all periods of Kant's extensive writing career, Louden here focuses on Kant's under-appreciated empirical work on human nature, with particular attention to the connections between this body of work and his much-discussed ethical theory. Kant repeatedly claimed that the question, "What is the human being" is philosophy's most fundamental question, one that encompasses all others. Louden analyzes and evaluates Kant's own answer to his question, showing how it differs from...