Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-11-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 110717645X

MacIntyre explores the philosophical, political, and moral issues encountered in understanding what the virtues require in contemporary social contexts.

Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity

Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity
Author: Jill Kraye
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2006-03-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1402030010

Over the past twenty years the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era has received increasing attention from experts in the history of philosophy. In part, this new interest arises from claims, made in literature aimed at a less specialist readership, that this transition was responsible for the subsequent philosophical and theological problems of the Enlightenment. Philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and theologians like John Milbank display a certain nostalgia for the medieval synthesis of Thomas Aquinas and, consequently, evaluate the period from 1300 to 1700 in rather negative terms. Other historians of philosophy writing for the general public, such as Charles Taylor, take a more positive view of the Reformation but nevertheless conclude that modernity has been shaped by 1 conflicts which stem from early modern times. Ethics and moral thought occupy a central place in these theories. It is assumed that we have lost something – the concept of virtue, for instance, or the source of common morality. Yet those who put forward such notions do not treat the history of ethics in detail. From the historian’s perspective, their far-reaching theoretical assumptions are based on a quite small body of textual evidence. In reality, there was a rich variety of approaches to moral thinking and ethical theories during the period from 1400 to 1600.

After Virtue

After Virtue
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2013-10-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1623569818

Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.

God, Philosophy, Universities

God, Philosophy, Universities
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2011
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0742544303

'What does it mean to be a human being?' Given this perennial question, Alasdair MacIntyre, one of America's preeminent philosophers, presents a compelling argument on the necessity and importance of philosophy. Because of a need to better understand Catholic philosophical thought, especially in the context of its historical development and realizing that philosophers interact within particular social and cultural situations, MacIntyre offers this brief history of Catholic philosophy. Tracing the idea of God through different philosophers' engagement of God and how this engagement has played out in universities, MacIntyre provides a valuable, lively, and insightful study of the disintegration of academic disciplines with knowledge. MacIntyre then demonstrates the dangerous implications of this happening and how universities can and ought to renew a shared understanding of knowledge in their mission. This engaging work will be a benefit and a delight to all readers.

Hegel's Social Ethics

Hegel's Social Ethics
Author: Molly Farneth
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2020-04-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691203113

Hegel’s Social Ethics offers a fresh and accessible interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel’s most famous book, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Drawing on important recent work on the social dimensions of Hegel’s theory of knowledge, Molly Farneth shows how his account of how we know rests on his account of how we ought to live. Farneth argues that Hegel views conflict as an unavoidable part of living together, and that his social ethics involves relationships and social practices that allow people to cope with conflict and sustain hope for reconciliation. Communities create, contest, and transform their norms through these relationships and practices, and Hegel’s model for them are often the interactions and rituals of the members of religious communities. The book’s close readings reveal the ethical implications of Hegel’s discussions of slavery, Greek tragedy, early modern culture wars, and confession and forgiveness. The book also illuminates how contemporary democratic thought and practice can benefit from Hegelian insights. Through its sustained engagement with Hegel’s ideas about conflict and reconciliation, Hegel’s Social Ethics makes an important contribution to debates about how to live well with religious and ethical disagreement.

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1994-05-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0268160562

Alasdair MacIntyre—whom Newsweek has called "one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world"—here presents his 1988 Gifford Lectures as an expansion of his earlier work Whose Justice? Which Rationality? He begins by considering the cultural and philosophical distance dividing Lord Gifford's late nineteenth-century world from our own. The outlook of that earlier world, MacIntyre claims, was definitively articulated in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which conceived of moral enquiry as both providing insight into and continuing the rational progress of mankind into ever greater enlightenment. MacIntyre compares that conception of moral enquiry to two rival conceptions also formulated in the late nineteenth century: that of Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and that expressed in the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII Aeterni Patris. The lectures focus on Aquinas's integration of Augustinian and Aristotelian modes of enquiry, the inability of the encyclopaedists' standpoint to withstand Thomistic or genealogical criticism, and the problems confronting the contemporary post-Nietzschean genealogist. MacIntyre concludes by considering the implications for education in universities and colleges.

Hegel's Theory of Recognition

Hegel's Theory of Recognition
Author: Sybol S.C. Anderson
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2011-10-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1441101632

Since the 1960s 'New Left' emancipatory movements have claimed that women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and other groups are oppressed. Some liberal theorists have treated their demands for equality as matters of toleration, of securing by law the equal treatment of cultures and conceptions of the good. However, much more is involved. Also at stake are conceptions of identity differences that inform social practices and perpetuate inequalities that are beyond the reach of legislation. This book outlines an alternative approach to a liberal politics of difference. Sybol Anderson begins by constructing a definition of oppression that illuminates, from a liberal perspective, its salient features. Exposing the limits of toleration as a response, Anderson reaches beyond it for a viable concept of recognition. Hegel's theory of recognition proves an indispensable resource in this endeavor. Anderson concludes, contrary to recent critics of Hegelian recognition, that Hegel's theory can successfully guide modern liberal states toward the achievement of social equality.

Muslim Ethics and Modernity

Muslim Ethics and Modernity
Author: Sheila McDonough
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2010-10-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1554587484

A study of modern Muslim ethics, focussed upon the lives and writings of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Mawlana Mawdudi, this monograph sheds light upon the modern ethical problems of contemporary Islam. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, often called a liberal, a modernist, or an acculturationist, represents the "liberal" trend of Sunni Muslim ethics. Khan's approach borrows much from reason, yet for Khanreason and revelation are not in conflict. Reason guides the interpretation of Islam when revelation is insufficient. In contrast, Mawlana Mawdudi's fundamentalism is, at least in part, anti-rational; it depends upon revelation (as it comes to one man in particular) and is very autocratic. McDonough is concerned with Khan and Mawdudi, both writers within the Indo-Pakistan Muslim tradition. Their conflicting views, their differing interpretations of ethics that suit Islam in the contemporary world, exemplify the difficulties and turmoil faced by Muslims the world over. For these men, modernity has not spelled the end of Islam; yet each has found a different way of relating Islam to the present and the future in faithfulness to traditional Islam. This monograph will be of interest to students of contemporary Islam, as well as to those interested in questions of comparative ethics, for the liberal/fundamentalist conflicts outlined in this monograph are analogous to manifestations of the same dichotomy in all world religions.

Moral Blindness

Moral Blindness
Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2013-04-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 074566962X

Evil is not confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme duress. Today it more frequently reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the casual turning away of one’s ethical gaze. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we take as normality and in the triviality and banality of everyday life, and not just in the abnormal and exceptional cases. The distinctive kind of moral blindness that characterizes our societies is brilliantly analysed by Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis through the concept of adiaphora: the placing of certain acts or categories of human beings outside of the universe of moral obligations and evaluations. Adiaphora implies an attitude of indifference to what is happening in the world – a moral numbness. In a life where rhythms are dictated by ratings wars and box-office returns, where people are preoccupied with the latest gadgets and forms of gossip, in our ‘hurried life’ where attention rarely has time to settle on any issue of importance, we are at serious risk of losing our sensitivity to the plight of the other. Only celebrities or media stars can expect to be noticed in a society stuffed with sensational, valueless information. This probing inquiry into the fate of our moral sensibilities will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the most profound changes that are silently shaping the lives of everyone in our contemporary liquid-modern world.