This book examines the issue of moral realism from a pragmatist point of view, drawing attention to our human practices of ethical evaluation and deliberation. It defends the essentially ungrounded and humanly fundamental place of ethics in our thought and action. Ethics must remain beyond justification and ubiquitous in our human form(s) of life.

Genocide is evil or nothing could be. It raises a host of questions about humanity, rights, justice, and reality, which are key areas of concern for philosophy. Strangely, however, philosophers have tended to ignore genocide. Even more problematic, philosophy and philosophers bear more responsibility for genocide than they have usually admitted. In Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide, an international group of twenty-five contemporary philosophers work to correct those deficiencies by showing how philosophy can and should repsond to genocide, (...) particularly in ways that defend human rights. (shrink)

At present, there is an enormous gulf between the visibility of evil and the paucity of our intellectual resources for coming to grips with it. We have been flooded with images of death camps, terrorist attacks and horrendous human suffering. Yet when we ask what we mean by radical evil and how we are to account for it, we seem to be at a loss for proper responses. Bernstein seeks to discover what we can learn about the meaning of evil (...) and human responsibility. He turns to philosophers such as Kant, who coined the expression 'radical evil', as well as to Hegel and Schelling. He also examines more recent explorations of evil, namely the thinking of Freud and Nietzsche on the moral psychology of evil. Finally, he looks at the way in which three post-Holocaust thinkers - Emmanuel Levinas, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt - have sought to come to grips with evil "after Auschwitz." Bernstein's primary concern throughout this challenging book is to enrich and deepen our understanding of evil in the contemporary world, and to emphasize the vigilance and personal responsibility required for combating it. Radical Evil will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy, social and political theory, and religious studies. (shrink)

A traditional association of judgment with "reason" has drawn upon and reinforced an opposition between reason and emotion. This, in turn, has led to a restricted view of the nature of moral judgment and of the subject as moral agent. The alternative, I suggest, is to abandon the traditional categories and to develop a new theory of judgment. I argue that the theory of judgment developed by Justus Buchler constitutes a robust alternative which does not prejudice the case against emotion. (...) Drawing on this theory I then develop how to conceptualize the ways in which feeling and emotion can be (or be components of) moral judgments. (shrink)

The book is written with grace and wit; again and again, Neiman writes the kind of sentences we dream of uttering in the perfect conversation: where every mot is bon. This is exemplary philosophy.

In this marvellous book, Raimond Gaita discusses ideas about love and hatred, good and evil, guilt and forgiveness. Moving, wise and inspiring, A Common Humanity explores personal, political and philosophical ideas about the kind of society and the sort of public conversation we might have in the twenty-first century. 'Raimond Gaita's insights are original and his prose is as eloquent as it is affecting.' Economist, Books of the Year, 2000.

Internationally renowned as one of the great French philosophers of the twentieth century, the late Emmanuel Levinas remains a pivotal figure across the humanistic disciplines for his insistence--against the grain of Western philosophical tradition--on the primacy of ethics in philosophical investigation. This first English translation of a series of twelve essays known as _Alterity and Transcendence_ offers a unique glimpse of Levinas defining his own place in the history of philosophy. Published by a mature thinker between 1967 and 1989, these (...) works exhibit a refreshingly accessible perspective that seasoned admirers and newcomers will appreciate. In today's world, where religious conceptions of exalted higher powers are constantly called into question by theoretical investigation and by the powerful influence of science and technology on our understanding of the universe, has the notion of transcendence been stripped of its significance? In Levinas's incisive model, transcendence is indeed alive--not in any notion of our relationship to a mysterious, sacred realm but in the idea of our worldly, subjective relationships to others. Without presupposing an intimate knowledge of the history of philosophy, Levinas explores the ways in which Plotinus, Descartes, Husserl, and Heidegger have encountered the question of transcendence. In discourses on the concepts of totality and infinity, he locates his own thinking in the context of pre-Socratic philosophers, Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, and Descartes. Always centering his discussions on the idea of interpersonal relations as the basis of transcendence, Levinas reflects on the rights of individuals (and how they are inextricably linked to those of others), the concept of peace, and the dialogic nature of philosophy. Finally, in interviews conducted by Christian Chabanis and Angelo Bianchi, Levinas responds to key questions not directly addressed in his writings. Throughout, _Alterity and Transcendence_ reveals a commitment to ethics as first philosophy--obliging modern thinkers to investigate not merely the true but the good. (shrink)

In its treatment of the role of emotion in ethics the argument of the book outlines a new way of packing motivational force into moral meaning that allows for a ...

Challenging prevailing interpretations of the development of modern philosophy, this book proposes a reinterpretation of the transcendental tradition, as represented primarily by Kant and Husserl, and counters Heidegger's influential reading of these philosophers. Author David Carr defends their subtle and complex transcendental investigations of the self and the life of subjectivity, and seeks to revive an understanding of what Husserl calls "the paradox of subjectivity"--an appreciation for the rich and sometimes contradictory character of experience.

This book contains essays, written between 1965 and 1990, which focus on the need to explore such issues as the nature of moral endeavor, the request for a justification of moral endeavor; the appeal to human flourishing; the nature of the ...

This essay examines critically a number of characteristics of transcendental philosophy. The question, ?What, if anything, distinguishes transcendental philosophy and transcendental arguments from other types of philosophy and argument??, is given a negative answer: nothing, no essential thing, demarcates transcendental argumentation or philosophy from other kinds of philosophical reflection. In particular, argumentative structure alone is not a defining feature of transcendental philosophy. Illustrative examples of recent debates on the meaning and philosophical relevance of the ?transcendental? are discussed in the essay: (...) e.g., attempts to ?naturalize? the transcendental, Wittgensteinian reflections on the limits of meaningful language, and ?merely methodological? interpretations of Kantian transcendental idealism. Through these case studies, it is shown how transcendental inquiry can be rearticulated in a pragmatist context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hypatia 18.2 (2003) 227-229 [Access article in PDF] Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Glover. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Jonathan's Glover's considerable reputation rests on the philosophical inquiry into the nature of human identity and on his critical deployment of consequentialist ethics to address a number of urgent issues regarding the beginning and end of life. In his latest book, Humanity: (...) A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (2001), he brings some of these themes together to try to make sense of the disturbing record of mass brutality and inhumanity that stretches through the last century. The deaths he addresses are those of countless millions of noncombatants, caught up in successive waves of atrocities that vary in their geographical location, scale, and duration, but not in their capacity to overwhelm the moral expectations and moral restraints in which we usually put our trust. Glover spares no feelings in his detailed and relentless charting of both the sociopolitical context of decline into moral chaos and the specificities of each torturous and murderous assault.Drawing on a range of material—from contemporary documentation and eyewitness accounts to the subsequent reflections of historians, politicians, and social theorists—he attempts to find common explanatory threads for a catalogue of killing, rape, and mutilation that is the work not only of those given over to abandoned excess, but of those perpetrators who held fast to rational principles. A series of supposedly exceptional events, such as that at My Lai, is set against the enormities of Hiroshima, Rwanda, Stalinist show trials, the Gulag, and the Cultural Revolution in China, where state interests and state policy are expressly involved. Not surprisingly the atrocities of Nazi Germany, and particularly the holocaust, are given the deepest consideration, but Glover's wide-ranging approach makes clear that little distinguishes mid-century Germans as especially open to moral dereliction. The resolution that it must never happen again has been breached time and again in various places and in various forms.Despite a plethora of endorsements from philosophers such as Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum, it would appear that Humanity is intended primarily for the lay reader. Certainly at a time when Israelis and Palestinians remain in a murderous face-off, when the world's primary military power, the United States, appears unmoved by "collateral" killing, and when India and Pakistan ratchet up the possibility of nuclear attack, every one of us could benefit from a little more insight into the often unchallenged slide from threat to war to moral atrocity. Glover clearly lays bare the mechanics of such developments, and effectively traces the ways in which each person might feel him or herself morally blameless by failing to grasp the outcomes of discrete individual acts [End Page 227].In his extensive account of Nazi Germany, Glover unravels the effects of distancing, of mindless obedience to authority, of putting efficiency before feeling, and of turning away rather than intervening in obvious wrongs. The hatred felt for the Jews and other less-than-ideal Aryans, and the desire to create by whatever means a purified state are paralleled worldwide by other conflicts, driven by what Glover calls "tribalism," or by a ruthless consequentialism in pursuit of putative social utopias (144). As he remarks of the Pol Pot regime: "As so often with social engineering, those doing the calculations of happiness became so immersed in means ("the Revolution") that they lost their grip on ends" (305). And, one assumes, vice versa. But what does this really tell us that is not already apparent in the description? The drawback of Glover's straightforward approach is that it eschews any deep level of analysis, and relies for insight, for the most part, on our existing moral beliefs and intuitions in the face of an accumulation of horrifying evidence of individual and state brutality. To make, and offer empirical support to, similar points over and over again, albeit with some significant variations, did not enhance my comprehension of the moral enormities, but rather served to reinforce their seeming inevitability.It is... (shrink)