Author: C. W. Maris Publisher: Springer ISBN: 9401744300 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 486
Book Description
a. 'Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. ' Thus Kant formulates his attitude to morality (Critique of Practical Reason, p. 260). He draws a sharp distinction between these two objects of admiration. The starry sky, he writes, represents my relationship to the natural, empirical world. Moral law, on the other hand, is of a completely different order. It ' . . . begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection (. . . ). ' (p. 260). So Kant sees morality as a separate metaphysical order opposed to the world of empirical phenomena. Human beings belong to both worlds. According to Kant, the personality derives nothing of value from its relationship with the empirical world. His part in the sensuous world of nature places man on a level with any animal which before long must give back to the rest of nature the substances of which it is made.
Author: Christian B. Miller Publisher: ISBN: 9780198744207 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Christian Miller presents a new account of moral character. Most of our friends, colleagues, and even family members are not virtuous people. They do not have virtues such as compassion, honesty, or courage. But at the same time, they are not vicious people either. They do not have vices such as cruelty, dishonesty, or cowardice. Instead most people today have characters which do not qualify as either virtuous or vicious. They have many positive moral features, but also many negative ones too. Our characters are decidedly mixed, and are much more complex than we might have thought. On the one hand, many of us would kill an innocent person in a matter of minutes under pressure from an authority figure as part of a psychology study. Or we would pretend to not see someone collapse from an apparent heart attack across the street. Or we would make a wide circle around someone's dropped papers rather than stop to help pick them up. Yet it is also true that many of us would help another person when we are by ourselves and hear sounds of a non-ambiguous emergency in the next room. Or we would come to the aid of a friend when feeling empathy for her need, and do so for altruistic rather than egoistic reasons. In Moral Character: An Empirical Theory Miller outlines a new picture of our moral character which involves what are called Mixed Character Traits. This picture can help make sense of how most of us are less than virtuous people but also morally better than the vicious.
Author: Sarah McGrath Publisher: ISBN: 0198805411 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
How fragile is our knowledge of morality, compared to other kinds of knowledge? Does knowledge of the difference between right and wrong fundamentally differ from knowledge of other kinds? Sarah McGrath offers new answers to these questions as she explores the possibilities, sources and characteristic vulnerabilities of moral knowledge.
Author: Bas C. van Fraassen Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300127960 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 302
Book Description
What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, and second in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion. Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy.
Author: Immanuel Kant Publisher: Courier Corporation ISBN: 0486113027 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
This 1788 work, based on belief in the immortality of the soul, established Kant as a vindicator of the truth of Christianity. It offers the most complete statement of his theory of free will.
Author: Paul Guyer Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691151172 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
Immanuel Kant famously said that he was awoken from his "dogmatic slumbers," and led to question the possibility of metaphysics, by David Hume's doubts about causation. Because of this, many philosophers have viewed Hume's influence on Kant as limited to metaphysics. More recently, some philosophers have questioned whether even Kant's metaphysics was really motivated by Hume. In Knowledge, Reason, and Taste, renowned Kant scholar Paul Guyer challenges both of these views. He argues that Kant's entire philosophy--including his moral philosophy, aesthetics, and teleology, as well as his metaphysics--can fruitfully be read as an engagement with Hume. In this book, the first to describe and assess Hume's influence throughout Kant's philosophy, Guyer shows where Kant agrees or disagrees with Hume, and where Kant does or doesn't appear to resolve Hume's doubts. In doing so, Guyer examines the progress both Kant and Hume made on enduring questions about causes, objects, selves, taste, moral principles and motivations, and purpose and design in nature. Finally, Guyer looks at questions Kant and Hume left open to their successors.
Author: Aaron Zimmerman Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136965343 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
How do we know right from wrong? Do we even have moral knowledge? Moral epistemology studies these and related questions about our understanding of virtue and vice. It is one of philosophy’s perennial problems, reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Hume and Kant, and has recently been the subject of intense debate as a result of findings in developmental and social psychology. In this outstanding introduction to the subject Aaron Zimmerman covers the following key topics: What is moral epistemology? What are its methods? Including a discussion of Socrates, Gettier and contemporary theories of knowledge skepticism about moral knowledge based on the anthropological record of deep and persistent moral disagreement, including contextualism moral nihilism, including debates concerning God and morality and the relation between moral knowledge and our motives and reasons to act morally epistemic moral scepticism, intuitionism and the possibility of inferring ‘ought’ from ‘is,’ discussing the views of Locke, Hume, Kant, Ross, Audi, Thomson, Harman, Sturgeon and many others how children acquire moral concepts and become more reliable judges criticisms of those who would reduce moral knowledge to value-neutral knowledge or attempt to replace moral belief with emotion. Throughout the book Zimmerman argues that our belief in moral knowledge can survive sceptical challenges. He also draws on a rich range of examples from Plato’s Meno and Dickens’ David Copperfield to Bernard Madoff and Saddam Hussein. Including chapter summaries and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Moral Epistemology is essential reading for all students of ethics, epistemology and moral psychology.
Author: Joel Marks Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 041563556X Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 147
Book Description
In this volume, Marks offers a defense of amorality as both philosophically justified and practicably livable. In so doing, the book marks a radical departure from both the new atheism and the mainstream of modern ethical philosophy. While in synch with their underlying aim of grounding human existence in a naturalistic metaphysics, the book takes both to task for maintaining a complacent embrace of morality. Marks advocates wiping the slate clean of outdated connotations by replacing the language of morality with a language of desire. The book begins with an analysis of what morality is and then argues that the concept is not instantiated in reality. Following this, the question of belief in morality is addressed: How would human life be affected if we accepted that morality does not exist? Marks argues that at the very least, a moralist would have little to complain about in an amoral world, and at best we might hope for a world that was more to our liking overall. An extended look at the human encounter with nonhuman animals serves as an illustration of amorality's potential to make both theoretical and practical headway in resolving heretofore intractable ethical problems.
Author: C. W. Maris
Author: David Hume
Author: Christian B. Miller
Author: Sarah McGrath
Author: Bas C. van Fraassen
Author: Sam Harris
Author: Immanuel Kant
Author: Paul Guyer
Author: Aaron Zimmerman
Author: Joel Marks