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One of Fichte's most important ideas - that nature can place limits on our ability to govern ourselves, and that anyone who values autonomy is thereby committed to the value of basic research and of the development of autonomy-enhancing technologies - has received little attention in the interpretative literature on Fichte, and has little currency in contemporary ethics. This volume aims to address both deficits. Beginning from a reconstruction of Fichte's theory of rational agency, this volume examines his arguments for the thesis that rational agency must have two constitutive ends: substantive and formal independence. It argues for a novel interpretation of Fichte's conception of substantive independence, and shows how Fichte's account of moral duties is derived from the end of substantive independence on that conception. It also argues for a new interpretation of Fichte's conception of formal independence, and explains why the usual understanding of this end as providing direct guidance for action must be mistaken. It encompasses a systematic reconstruction of Fichte's first-order claims in normative ethics and the philosophy of right.
This book traces a complex of issues surrounding moral agency from Kant through Schelling to Kierkegaard.
This is a short, accessible introduction to John Rawls' thought and gives a thorough and concise presentation of the main outlines of Rawls' theory as well as drawing links between Rawls' enterprise and other important positions in moral and political philosophy.
The first volume on Schelling in English exploring the study of the history of philosophy and core systematic philosophical issues.
Owen Ware here develops and defends a novel interpretation of Fichte's moral philosophy as an ethics of wholeness. While virtually forgotten for most of the twentieth century, Fichte's System of Ethics (1798) is now recognized by scholars as a masterpiece in the history of post-Kantian philosophy, as well as a key text for understanding the work of later German idealist thinkers. This book provides a careful examination of the intellectual context in which Fichte's moral philosophy evolved, and of the specific arguments he offers in response to Kant and his immediate successors. A distinctive feature of this study is a focus on the foundational concepts of Fichte's ethics--freedom, morality,...
Kierkegaard and Freedom is a critical exploration of the ideas of Kierkegaard on the various problems surrounding the issue of human freedom. Kierkegaard's views here have been largely ignored by modern English-speaking philosophers. Through the combined efforts of eleven philosophers and scholars this book enndeavours to fill the gap by giving a clear presentation of Kierkegaard's position on such things as radical choice, autonomy, freedom and anxiety, necessity and fate, and self-deception, all the while critically assessing his contributions to one of philosophy's most perplexing problems.
Traces the development of Kant's views on free will from earlier writings through the three Critiques and beyond.
In the late 1830s and early 1840s Hans. L. Martensen (1808-1884) helped to introduce the thought of G.W.F. Hegel to the intellectual world of Copenhagen. Between Hegel and Kierkegaard offers the first English translations of three important early writings of Martensen in the philosophy of religion. These treatises evidence an original and critical interpretation of Hegel's thought from a speculative theological point of view. The heart of Martensen's philosophy of religion is the idea of freedom or personality grounded in its relation to the divine. These writings exercised an important and formative influence on the young Kierkegaard, Martensen's student, even though Kierkegaard later became a formidable opponent and critic of Martensen.
L. Nandi Theunissen offers an original and provocative account of the value of humanity. Human beings have value just as anything of value has value: because we are capable of being of value to someone--in the first place, to ourselves. And this explains the key forms of ethical responsiveness that we owe to one another.
Allen W. Wood presents the first book-length systematic exposition in English of Fichte's most important ethical work, the System of Ethics (1798). He places this work in the context of Fichte's life and career, of his philosophical system as conceived in the later Jena period, and in relation to his philosophy of right or justice and politics. Wood discusses Fichte's defense of freedom of the will, his grounding of the moral principle, theory of moral conscience, transcendental deduction of intersubjectivity, and his conception of free rational communication and the rational society. He develops and emphasizes the social and political radicalism of Fichte's moral and political philosophy, and brings out the philosophical interest of Fichte's positions and arguments for present day philosophy. Fichte's Ethical Thought defends the position that Fichte is a major thinker in the history of ethics, and the most important figure in the history of modern continental philosophy in the past two centuries.