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  1. (1 other version)Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity.Charles Taylor - 1994 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1):187-190.
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  • The Quality of Life.Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen & Master Amartya Sen (eds.) - 1993 - Oxford University Press.
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  • Transformative Experience.Laurie Paul - 2014 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    How should we make choices when we know so little about our futures? L. A. Paul argues that we must view life decisions as choices to make discoveries about the nature of experience. Her account of transformative experience holds that part of the value of living authentically is to experience our lives and preferences in whatever ways they evolve.
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  • The Significance of a Life’s Shape.Dale Dorsey - 2015 - Ethics 125 (2):303-330.
    The shape of a life hypothesis holds, very roughly, that lives are better when they have an upward, rather than downward, slope in terms of momentary well-being. This hypothesis is plausible and has been thought to cause problems for traditional principles of prudential value/rationality. In this article, I conduct an inquiry into the shape of a life hypothesis that addresses two crucial questions. The first question is: what is the most plausible underlying explanation of the significance of a life’s shape? (...)
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  • The story of a life.Connie S. Rosati - 2013 - Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (1-2):21-50.
    This essay explores the nature of narrative representations of individual lives and the connection between these narratives and personal good. It poses the challenge of determining how thinking of our lives in story form contributes distinctively to our good in a way not reducible to other value-conferring features of our lives. Because we can meaningfully talk about our lives going well for us at particular moments even if they fail to go well overall or over time, the essay maintains that (...)
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  • What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting'.L. A. Paul - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (2):1-23.
    It seems natural to choose whether to have a child by reflecting on what it would be like to actually have a child. I argue that this natural approach fails. If you choose to become a parent, and your choice is based on projections about what you think it would be like for you to have a child, your choice is not rational. If you choose to remain childless, and your choice is based upon projections about what you think it (...)
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  • The mess inside: narrative, emotion, and the mind.Peter Goldie - 2012 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Narrative thinking -- Narrative thinking about one's past -- Grief : a case study -- Narrative thinking about one's future -- Self-forgiveness : a case study -- The narrative sense of self -- Narrative, truth, life, and fiction.
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  • The Ethics of Authenticity.Charles Taylor - 1991 - Harvard University Press.
    While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most ...
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  • Pleasure as Self-Discovery.Samuel Clark - 2012 - Ratio 25 (3):260-276.
    This paper uses readings of two classic autobiographies, Edmund Gosse's Father & Son and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, to develop a distinctive answer to an old and central question in value theory: What role is played by pleasure in the most successful human life? A first section defends my method. The main body of the paper then defines and rejects voluntarist, stoic, and developmental hedonist lessons to be taken from central crises in my two subjects' autobiographies, and argues for a (...)
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  • Perfectionism.Thomas Hurka - 1993 - New York, US: Oxford University Press. Edited by Thomas L. Carson & Paul K. Moser.
    Perfectionism is one of the leading moral views of the Western tradition, defended by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Green. Defined broadly, it holds that what is right is whatever most promotes certain objective human goods such as knowledge, achievement, and deep personal relations. Defined more narrowly, it identifies these goods by reference to human nature, so the human good consistsin developing the properties fundamental to human beings. If it is fundamental to humans to be rational (Aristotle), (...)
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  • Love, Poetry, and the Good Life: Mill's Autobiography and Perfectionist Ethics.Samuel Clark - 2010 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (6):565-578.
    I argue for a perfectionist reading of Mill’s account of the good life, by using the failures of development recorded in his Autobiography as a way to understand his official account of happiness in Utilitarianism. This work offers both a new perspective on Mill’s thought, and a distinctive account of the role of aesthetic and emotional capacities in the most choiceworthy human life. I consider the philosophical purposes of autobiography, Mill’s disagreements with Bentham, and the nature of competent judges and (...)
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  • Self-Realization in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life.Jon Elster - 1986 - Social Philosophy and Policy 3 (2):97.
    In arguments in support of capitalism, the following propositions are sometimes advanced or presupposed: the best life for the individual is one of consumption, understood in a broad sense that includes aesthetic pleasures and entertainment as well as consumption of goods in the ordinary sense; consumption is to be valued because it promotes happiness or welfare, which is the ultimate good; since there are not enough opportunities for consumption to provide satiation for everybody, some principles of distributive justice must be (...)
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  • Well‐Being And Time.J. David Velleman - 1991 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1):48-77.
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  • The possibility of altruism.Thomas Nagel - 1970 - Oxford,: Clarendon P..
    Just as there are rational requirements on thought, there are rational requirements on action. This book defends a conception of ethics, and a related conception of human nature, according to which altruism is included among the basic rational requirements on desire and action. Altruism itself depends on the recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.
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  • (1 other version)After virtue: a study in moral theory.Alasdair C. MacIntyre - 2007 - Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.
    This classic and controversial book examines the roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in modern life, and proposes a path for its recovery.
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  • Arts and minds.Gregory Currie - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Philosophical questions about the arts go naturally with other kinds of questions about them. Art is sometimes said to be an historical concept. But where in our cultural and biological history did art begin? If art is related to play and imagination, do we find any signs of these things in our nonhuman relatives? Sometimes the other questions look like ones the philosopher of art has to answer. Anyone who thinks that interpretation in the arts is an activity that leaves (...)
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  • Welfare, happiness, and ethics.L. W. Sumner - 1996 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Moral philosophers agree that welfare matters. But they disagree about what it is, or how much it matters. In this vital new work, Wayne Sumner presents an original theory of welfare, investigating its nature and discussing its importance. He considers and rejects all notable theories of welfare, both objective and subjective, including hedonism and theories founded on desire or preference. His own theory connects welfare closely with happiness or life satisfaction. Reacting against the value pluralism that currently dominates moral philosophy, (...)
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  • Well-being: its meaning, measurement, and moral importance.James Griffin - 1986 - Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Clarendon Press.
    "Well-being," "welfare," "utility," and "quality of life," all closely related concepts, are at the center of morality, politics, law, and economics. Griffin's book, while primarily a volume of moral philosophy, is relevant to all of these subjects. Griffin offers answers to three central questions about well-being: what is the best way to understand it, can it be measured, and where should it fit in moral and political thought. With its breadth of investigation and depth of insight, this work holds significance (...)
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  • Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature Varieties and Plausibility of Hedonism.Fred Feldman - 2004 - Oxford, GB: Clarendon Press. Edited by Fred Feldman.
    Fred Feldman's fascinating new book sets out to defend hedonism as a theory about the Good Life. He tries to show that, when carefully and charitably interpreted, certain forms of hedonism yield plausible evaluations of human lives. Feldman begins by explaining the question about the Good Life. As he understands it, the question is not about the morally good life or about the beneficial life. Rather, the question concerns the general features of the life that is good in itself for (...)
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  • Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions (...)
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  • Design and Truth in Autobiography.Roy Pascal - 1960 - Routledge.
    Originally published in 1960. Is there an art of autobiography? What are its origins and how has it come to acquire the form we know today? For what does the autobiographer seek, and why should it be so popular? This study suggests some of the answers to these questions. It takes the view that autobiography is one of the dominant and characteristic forms of literary self-expression and deserves examination for its own sake. This book outlines a definition of the form (...)
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  • A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition.John Rawls - 1999 - Harvard University Press.
    Previous edition, 1st, published in 1971.
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  • What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being.Richard Kraut - 2007 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
    What is good, how do we know, and how important is it? In this book, one of our most respected analytical philosophers reorients these questions around the notion of what causes human beings to flourish. Observing that we can sensibly address what is good for plants and animals no less than what is good for people, Kraut applies a general principle to the entire living world: what is good for complex organisms consists in the exercise of their natural powers.
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  • The Constitution of Selves.Marya Schechtman (ed.) - 1996 - Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
    Marya Schechtman takes issue with analytic philosophy's emphasis on the first sort of question to the exclusion of the second.
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  • Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.George Lakoff - 1987 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (4):299-302.
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  • (1 other version)Truth and Truthfulness An Essay in Genealogy.Bernard Williams - 2002 - Philosophy 78 (305):411-414.
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  • What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-being.Richard Kraut - 2009 - Analysis 69 (3):576-578.
    Anyone familiar with Richard Kraut's work in ancient philosophy will be excited to see him putting aside the dusty tomes of the ancients and delving into ethics first-hand. He does not disappoint. His book is a lucid and wide-ranging discussion that provides at least the core of an ethical theory and an appealing set of answers to a range of ethical questions.Kraut aims to provide an alternative to utilitarianism that preserves the good-centred nature of that theory. He claims that all (...)
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  • (1 other version)Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy.Bernard Williams - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (219):343-352.
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  • (1 other version)Good Work.Samuel Clark - 2015 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 34 (1):61-73.
    Work is on one side a central arena of self-making, self-understanding, and self-development, and on the other a deep threat to our flourishing. My question is: what kind of work is good for human beings, and what kind bad? I first characterise work as necessary productive activity. My answer to my question then develops a perfectionist account of the human good: the good is the full development and expression of human potentials and capacities; this development and expression happens over a (...)
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  • Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind.John R. Searle - 1983 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    John Searle's Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979) developed a highly original and influential approach to the study of language. But behind both works lay the assumption that the philosophy of language is in the end a branch of the philosophy of the mind: speech acts are forms of human action and represent just one example of the mind's capacity to relate the human organism to the world. The present book is concerned with these biologically fundamental capacities, and, (...)
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  • Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind.Christopher Peacocke - 1986 - Philosophical Review 95 (4):603.
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  • After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.Samuel Scheffler - 1983 - Philosophical Review 92 (3):443.
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  • The Constitution of Selves.Christopher Williams & Marya Schechtman - 1998 - Philosophical Review 107 (4):641.
    Can we understand what makes someone the same person without understanding what it is to be a person? Prereflectively we might not think so, but philosophers often accord these questions separate treatments, with personal-identity theorists claiming the first question and free-will theorists the second. Yet much of what is of interest to a person—the possibility of survival over time, compensation for past hardships, concern for future projects, or moral responsibility—is not obviously intelligible from the perspective of either question alone. Marya (...)
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  • Welfare and Rational Care.Stephen Darwall - 2002 - Princeton University Press.
    What kind of life best ensures human welfare? Since the ancient Greeks, this question has been as central to ethical philosophy as to ordinary reflection. But what exactly is welfare? This question has suffered from relative neglect. And, as Stephen Darwall shows, it has done so at a price. Presenting a provocative new "rational care theory of welfare," Darwall proves that a proper understanding of welfare fundamentally changes how we think about what is best for people.Most philosophers have assumed that (...)
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  • Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy.Bernard Williams - 2002 - Princeton: Princeton University Press.
    What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combination of passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine.Modern culture exhibits two attitudes toward truth: suspicion of being deceived and skepticism that objective truth exists at (...)
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  • Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.Charles Taylor - 1989 - Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press.
    'Most of us are still groping for answers about what makes life worth living, or what confers meaning on individual lives', writes Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. 'This is an essentially modern predicament.' Charles Taylor's latest book sets out to define the modern identity by tracing its genesis, analysing the writings of such thinkers as Augustine, Descartes, Montaigne, Luther, and many others. This then serves as a starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. Taylor argues that modern (...)
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  • What is the Rational Care Theory of Welfare?: A Comment on Stephen Darwall’s Welfare and Rational Care.Fred Feldman - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 130 (3):585-601.
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  • Value and the Good Life.Thomas L. Carson - 2000 - University of Notre Dame Press.
    For as long as humans have pondered philosophical issues, they have contemplated the good life. Yet most suggestions about how to live a good life rest on assumptions about what the good life actually is. Thomas Carson here confronts that question from a fresh perspective. Surveying the history of philosophy, he addresses first-order questions about what is good and bad as well as metaethical questions concerning value judgments. Carson considers a number of established viewpoints concerning the good life. He offers (...)
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  • Self-Fulfillment.Alan Gewirth - 1998 - Princeton University Press.
    Cultures around the world have regarded self-fulfillment as the ultimate goal of human striving and as the fundamental test of the goodness of a human life. The ideal has also been criticized, however, as egotistical or as so value-neutral that it fails to distinguish between, for example, self-fulfilled sinners and self-fulfilled saints. Alan Gewirth presents here a systematic and highly original study of self-fulfillment that seeks to overcome these and other arguments and to justify the high place that the ideal (...)
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  • The best things in life: a guide to what really matters.Thomas Hurka - 2011 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Feeling good: four ways -- Finding that feeling -- The place of pleasure -- Knowing what's what -- Making things happen -- Being good -- Love and friendship -- Putting it together.
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  • Schopenhauer as educator.Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - 1965 - Chicago,: Regenery. Edited by Eliseo Vivas.
    Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher. His writing included critiques of religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, using a distinctive style and displaying a fondness for aphorism. Nietzsche s influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. He began his career as a philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems, which would (...)
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  • (4 other versions)The methods of ethics.Henry Sidgwick - 1884 - Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press. Edited by Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones.
    This Hackett edition, first published in 1981, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the seventh edition as published by Macmillan and Company, Limited. From the forward by John Rawls: In the utilitarian tradition Henry Sidgwick has an important place. His fundamental work, The Methods of Ethics, is the clearest and most accessible formulation of what we may call 'the classical utilitarian doctorine.' This classical doctrine holds that the ultimate moral end of social and individual action is the greatest net (...)
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  • Goods and virtues.Michael Slote - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Offers a critique of prevalent approaches to human good and virtue. Slote shows that typical philosophical accounts of the virtues and human goods oversimplify the subject and that a more exact approach is needed.
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  • Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind.Richard E. Aquila - 1985 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (1):159-170.
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  • (3 other versions)The Methods of Ethics.Henry Sidgwick - 1890 - International Journal of Ethics 1 (1):120-121.
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  • Prudential Value.Valerie Tiberius - 2015 - In Iwao Hirose & Jonas Olson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory. New York NY: Oxford University Press USA.
    Prudential value is the good for a person. It is often identified with well-being, so that well-being is not one prudential value among many, but instead the most general category of prudential value. This chapter considers the main theories of well-being—including eudaimonism, desire satisfactionism, and hedonism—in light of two main theoretical desiderata: subject-relativity and normativity. A good theory of well-being ought to explain how its conception of well-being is good for the person whose well-being it is. A good theory should (...)
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  • Review of Sumner, *Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics*. [REVIEW]Bruce Brower - 1998 - Philosophical Review 107 (2):309.
    Despite being co-opted by economists and politicians for their own purposes, ‘welfare’ traditionally refers to well-being, and it is in this sense that L. W. Sumner understands the term. His book is a clear, careful, and well-crafted investigation into major theories of welfare, accompanied by a one-chapter defense of “welfarism,” the view that welfare is the only foundational value necessary for ethics. Sumner himself is attracted to utilitarianism, but he makes no commitment to it in this work, which will be (...)
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  • Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism.David L. Norton - 1976 - Princeton University Press.
    Very much the same idea resurfaced in modern times with the British idealists and Continental existentialists. The author reviews these antecedents, showing how his theory differs from those of his predecessors.
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  • Taking ourselves seriously & Getting it right.Harry G. Frankfurt - 2006 - Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Edited by Debra Satz.
    Harry G. Frankfurt begins his inquiry by asking, “What is it about human beings that makes it possible for us to take ourselves seriously?” Based on The Tanner Lectures in Moral Philosophy, Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right delves into this provocative and original question. The author maintains that taking ourselves seriously presupposes an inward-directed, reflexive oversight that enables us to focus our attention directly upon ourselves, and “[it] means that we are not prepared to accept ourselves just as (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Well-Being. Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance.James Griffin - 1986 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 52 (1):171-171.
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