Suchergebnisse

"This essay is divided into five chapters. In the first the questions initially posed about our desires and how we should think about them are questions that plain non philosophical persons often find themselves asking. When however they carry their attempt to answer these questions a little further, they find that they have, perhaps inadvertently, become philosophers, and that they need some at least of the conceptual and argumentative resources which professional philosophers provide. So their enquiry, like this one, becomes philosophical. But philosophy in our culture has become an almost exclusively specialized academic discipline whose practitioners for the most part address only each other rather than the educated lay person. Moreover those same practitioners have for the last fifty years been harassed by the academic system into publishing more and more as a condition for academic survival, so that on most topics of philosophical interest there is by now an increasingly large, an often unmanageable large body of literature that has to be read as a prologue before adding to it one more item. Readers should be warned that my references to this literature are selective and few. Had I conscientiously attempted not only to find my way through all the relevant published writing in the philosophy of mind and in ethics, but then also explained how I had come to terms with the claims advanced by its authors, I would have had to write at impossible length and in a format that would have made this essay inaccessible to the lay reader for whom it is written"--

Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the most creative and important philosophers working today. This volume presents a selection of his classic essays on ethics and politics collected together for the first time, focussing particularly on the themes of moral disagreement, moral dilemmas, and truthfulness and its importance. The essays range widely in scope, from Aristotle and Aquinas and what we need to learn from them, to our contemporary economic and social structures and the threat which they pose to the realization of the forms of ethical life. They will appeal to a wide range of readers across philosophy and especially in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and theology

Hume on Morality -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Editor's lntroduction -- A Note on the Text -- Enquiry -- Advertisement to the Collected Essays -- An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals -- Section I: Of the General Principles of Morals -- Section II: Of Benevolence -- Section III: Of Justice -- Section IV: Of Political Society -- Section V: Why Utility Pleases -- Section VI: Of Qualities Useful to Ourselves -- Section VII: Of Qualities Immediately Agreeable to Ourselves -- Section VIII: Of Qualities Immediately Agreeable to Others -- Section IX: Conclusion -- Appendix -- Appendix I: Concerning Moral Sentiment -- Concerning Moral Sentiment -- Appendix II: Of Self-Love -- Appendix III: Some Further Considerations with Regard to Justice -- Appendix IV: Of Some Verbal Disputes -- A Dialogue -- A Treatise of Human Nature -- BOOK II. OF THE PASSIONS -- Part III: Of the Will and Direct Passions -- BOOK Ill. OF MORALS -- Part I: Of Virtue and Vice in General -- Part II: Of Justice and lniustice -- Part III: Of the Other Virtues and Vices -- Essays -- OF THE ORIGINAL CONTRACT -- OF THE STANDARD OF TASTE -- OF SUICIDE -- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion -- Part X -- Part XI -- Index