Shaping a modern ethics : the humanist legacy from Nietzsche to feminism
Benjamin Bennett
Bok · Engelsk · 2021
| Omfang | 200 sider
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| Opplysninger | Først utgitt i 2020. - Preliminary Remarks: Wittgenstein and Strawson ; Chapter One: Introduction: Ethics, “Literature,” and Irony ; Chapter Two: Nietzsche and Rorty: The Ethics of Irony ; Chapter Three: Kant and Leibniz ; Chapter Four: Lessing: History, Irony, and Diaspora ; Chapter Five: Lessing and Freud: Theory, Wisdom, and the Scope of Ethics ; Chapter Six: Habermas, Rorty, and Machiavelli ; Chapter Seven: Woolf, Bachmann, Wittig: Toward a Feminist Ethics ; Conclusion, or Not. - Is there any such thing as a single ethical system to which all human beings could conceivably subscribe? The short answer is no; and most people, being tolerant, would probably agree with this answer. Yet most people, precisely in being tolerant, also subscribe to an idea of “human rights” which presupposes just such a universal ethics. This basic question of ethics is similarly treacherous when approached on a higher technical level. Specialists have long recognized that Kant's categorical imperative is neither theoretically nor practically tenable. But efforts to revive and repair the Kantian project-including especially the monumental work of Jürgen Habermas-have all themselves been theoretically questionable, while developing a complexity that makes them impractical.Must we then simply do without ethics in the sense of a universal ethical method?By way of a close study of literary and philosophical texts, from Freud to Machiavelli, Benjamin Bennett shows why the failure of a universal or propositional ethics is indeed unavoidable. He uncovers a modern non-propositional ethics that cannot be grasped in a single theoretical move but can only be approached as a collection of instances of a modern ethical “we”, three key examples of which Bennett explores in this book:- The “we” of irony, whose speakers share a strictly preter-verbal knowledge which is concealed in their actual utterances- The insistent exclusive “we” of a group that has neither its own physical locality nor even a clear intellectual identity, comparable to the “we” of Jews in the diaspora- The “we” of feminism, a separate “we” from that embracing people who happen to have been born women.
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| Emner | |
| Dewey | |
| ISBN | 9781350122857. - 9781350262317 : £28.99
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