Details

Subject(s)

• Ethics [Browse]
• Culture [Browse]
• Philosophy [Browse]

Series

• Oxford Academic. [More in this series]
• Oxford scholarship online

Summary note

These essays discuss various ontological and epistemological questions in moral philosophy, drawing on ideas from Platonic-Aristotelian ethics, the later Wittgenstein, and Iris Murdoch, though without seeking to weave these into any unified system. The general approach is realist or objectivist, paying some attention to the role of imaginative literature (especially the novel) in ethical formation. The method used can be broadly described as phenomenological; the phenomena in question extend to value-perception on the one hand and to practical reason, including political deliberation, on the other. A common theme is the lived experience of the socially situated subject, including our capacity for engagement with the values present in an inherited tradition or 'form of life'. Such engagement, once raised to consciousness, may contain elements both of affirmation and of cultural critique. In the book as a whole, the critical theme predominates, with a certain emphasis on discourses of social disruption. But it is always assumed that the right place to stand as an observer of the domain of value is within that domain, and that moral critique will be immanent with respect to the culture addressed that is, it will make do with just the conceptual and linguistic resources available to ordinary participants in moral, political, or aesthetic conversation.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Source of description

Description based on Publisher website; title from home page (viewed on October 06, 2022).

Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Wittgenstein and Moral Realism: The Debate Continues
• 2. Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and the 'Apocalyptic View'
• 3. 'The Sickness of a Time': Social Pathology and Therapeutic Philosophy
• 4. Second Nature, Habitus, and the Ethical: Remarks on Wittgenstein and Bourdieu
• 5. Practical Reason and Character-Formation
• 6. Between Tradition and Criticism: The 'Uncodifiability' of the Normative
• 7. The Unquiet Life: Salience and Moral Responsibility
• 8. The Varieties of Attention
• 9. The Elusiveness of the Ethical: From Murdoch to Diamond
• 10. Post-Existentialist Moments: Murdoch and Highsmith
• 11. Iris Murdoch and the Quality of Consciousness
• 12. Vulnerable and Invulnerable: Two Faces of Dialectical Reasoning
• 13. Judith Butler on Political Agency
• 14. Philosophy, Literature, Politics: The Cases of Rorty and Collingwood
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index.

Show 15 more Contents items

Other format(s)

Also available in Print and PDF edition.

Other title(s)

Ethics and culture

ISBN

• 0-19-194646-X
• 0-19-266885-4
• 0-19-266884-6

OCLC

1349278401

Doi

10.1093/oso/9780192856166.001.0001

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