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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Ethics & moral philosophy
Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as central
to philosophical inquiry. In recent years conceptual analysis has
been undervalued and, Jackson suggests, widely misunderstood; he
argues that there is nothing especially mysterious about it and a
whole range of important questions cannot be productively addressed
without it. He anchors his argument in discussion of specific
philosophical issues, starting with the metaphysical doctrine of
physicalism and moving on, via free will, meaning, personal
identity, motion and change, to the philosophy of colour and to
ethics. The significance of different kinds of supervenience
theses, Kripke and Putnam's work in the philosophy of modality and
language, and the role of intuitions about possible cases receive
detailed attention. Jackson concludes with a defence of a version
of analytical descriptivism in ethics. In this way the book not
only offers a methodological programme for philosophy, but also
throws fascinating new light on some much-debated problems and
their interrelations. puffs which may be quoted (please do not edit
without consulting OUP editor): 'This is an outstanding book. It
covers a vast amount of philosophy in a very short space, advances
a number of original and striking positions, and manages to be both
clear and concise in its expositions of other views and forceful in
its criticisms of them. The book offers something new for those
interested in the various individual problems it
discusses-conceptual analysis, the mind-body relation, secondary
qualities, modality, and ethical realism. But unifying these
individual discussions is an ambitious structure which amounts to
an outline of a complete metaphysical system, and an outline of an
epistemology for this metaphysics. It is hard to think of a central
area of analytic philosophy which will not be touched by Jackson's
conclusions.' Tim Crane, Reader in Philosophy, University College
London 'The writing is clear, straightforward, and down to
earth-the usual virtues one expects from Jackson . . . what he has
to say is innovative and valuable . . . the book deals with a large
number of apparently diverse philosophical issues, but it is also
an elegantly unified work. What gives it unity is the
metaphilosophical framework that Jackson works out with great care
and persuasiveness. This is the first serious and sustained work on
the methodology of metaphysics in recent memory. What he says about
the role of conceptual analysis in metaphysics is an important and
timely contribution. . . . It is refreshing and heartening to see a
first-class analytic philosopher doing some serious
metaphilosophical work . . . I think that the book will be greeted
as an important event in philosophical publishing.' Jaegwon Kim,
Professor of Philosophy, Brown University
A Treatise of Human Nature was published between 1739 and 1740.
Book I, entitled Of the Understanding, contains Hume's
epistemology, i.e., his account of the manner in which we acquire
knowledge in general, its justification (to the extent that he
thought it could be justified), and its limits. Book II, entitled
Of the Passions, expounds most of what could be called Hume's
philosophy of psychology in general, and his moral psychology
(including discussions of the problem of the freedom of the will
and the rationality of action) in particular. Book III, entitled Of
Morals, is also divided into three parts. Part II of Book III,
entitled Of justice and injustice, is the subject of the present
volume. In it Hume attempts to give an empiricist theory of
justice. He rejects the view, approximated to in varying degrees by
Cumberland, Cudworth, Locke, Clarke, Wollaston, and Butler, that
justice is something natural and part of the nature of things, and
that its edicts are eternal and immutable, and discernible by
reason. Hume maintains, on the contrary, as did Hobbes and
Mandeville, that justice is a matter of observing rules or
conventions which are of human invention, and that, in consequence,
our acquiring a knowledge of justice is an empirical affair of
ascertaining what these rules or conventions are.
In this volume, Kieran McGroarty provides a philosophical
commentary on a section of the Enneads written by the last great
Neoplatonist thinker, Plotinus. The treatise is entitled
"Concerning Well-Being" and was written at a late stage in
Plotinus' life when he was suffering from an illness that was
shortly to kill him. Its main concern is with the good man and how
he should pursue the good life. The treatise is therefore central
to our understanding of Plotinus' ethical theory, and the
commentary seeks to explicate and elucidate that theory. Plotinus'
views on how one should live in order to fulfill oneself as a human
being are as relevant now as they were in the third century AD. All
Greek and Latin is translated, while short summaries introducing
the content of each chapter help to make Plotinus' argument clear
even to the non-specialist.
Meaning (significance) and nature are this book's principal topics.
They seem an odd couple, like raisins and numbers, though they
elide when meanings of a global sort-ideologies and religions, for
example-promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one
against the other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates
and a coal face to miners, gluons to physicists, prayer and
redemption to priests. Are there many realities, or many
perspectives on one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive
naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza: "natura naturans,
natura naturata." Nature naturing is an array of mutually
conditioning material processes in spacetime. Each structure or
event-storm clouds forming, nature natured-is self-differentiating,
self-stabilizing, and sometimes self-disassembling; each alters or
transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise
anticipated discoveries and analyses to which neither thinker had
access, though physics and biology confirm their hypothesis beyond
reasonable doubt. Hence the question this book considers: Is
reality divided:nature vrs. lived experience? Or is experience,
with all its meanings and values, the complex expression of natural
processes?
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