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Comparing is one of the most essential practices, in our everyday life as well as in science and humanities. In this in-depth philosophical analysis of the structure, practice and ethics of comparative procedures, Hartmut von Sass expands on the significance of comparison. Elucidating the ramified structure of comparing, von Sass suggests a typology of comparisons before introducing the notion of comparative injustice and the limits of comparisons. He elaborates on comparing as practice by relating comparing to three relative practices – orienting, describing, and expressing oneself – to unfold some of the most important chapters of what might be called comparativism. This approach allows von Sass to clarify the idea of the incomparable, distinguish between different versions of incomparability and shed light on important ethical aspects of comparisons today. Confronting the claim that we are living in an age of comparisons, his book is an important contribution to ideas surrounding all-encompassing measurements and scalability and their critique.
Alice Crary’s Inside Ethics is a transformative account of moral thought about human beings and animals. We have come to think of human beings and animals as elements of a morally indifferent reality that reveals itself only to neutral or science-based methods. This little-commented-on trend, which shapes the work of moral philosophers and popular ethical writers alike, has pernicious effects, distorting our understanding of the difficulty of moral thinking. Inside Ethics traces the roots of existing views to tendencies in ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Crary underlines the moral urgency of revisiting our approach in ethics so that, instead of assuming we confront a world tha...
Science increasingly deals with human behavior: biology, neuroscience, genetics, psychology, evolutionary theory, and ethology all bring new insights into our actions and uncover new facts about our agency. However, what is the philosophical significance of their findings? The answer to this question varies according to one's background philosophical views. On the one hand, the dominant empiricist view contends that the sciences can in principle tell us everything there is to know about human ...
Law's Ideal Dimension provides a comprehensive account in English of renowned legal theorist Robert Alexy's understanding of jurisprudence, as expanded upon from his publications A Theory of Legal Argumentation (OUP 1989), A Theory of Constitutional Rights (OUP 1985), and The Argument from Injustice (OUP 1992). The collection is divided into three parts. Part One concerns the nature of law: it explores its real and ideal dimensions and how the ideal dimension of law is sometimes employed but does not play a systematically important role. Part Two discusses constitutional rights, human rights, and proportionality. It defends the construction of constitutional rights as principles against objections raised by the rule construction and elaborates on the nature of constitutional rights as well as the mathematical balancing of those rights. Part Three concerns the relation between argumentation, correctness, and law. The author concludes this volume with a biographical reflection.
In Transcendent Love: Dostoevsky and the Search for a Global Ethic, Leonard G. Friesen ranges widely across Dostoevsky's stories, novels, journalism, notebooks, and correspondence to demonstrate how Dostoevsky engaged with ethical issues in his times and how those same issues continue to be relevant to today's ethical debates. Friesen contends that the Russian ethical voice, in particular Dostoevsky's voice, deserves careful consideration in an increasingly global discussion of moral philosophy and the ethical life. Friesen challenges the view that contemporary liberalism provides a religiously neutral foundation for a global ethic. He argues instead that Dostoevsky has much to offer when it...
Few philosophical issues have had as long and elaborate a history as the problem of free will, which has been contested at every stage of the history of the subject. The present work practices an extensive bibliography of this elaborate literature, listing some five thousand items ranging from classical antiquity to the present.
In Plato's Republic, Socrates spoke of an 'ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy' which he offered to resolve once and for all by banning the poets from his ideal city. Few philosophers have taken Socrates at his word, and out of the ancient quarrel there has emerged a long tradition that has sought to value literature chiefly as a useful supplement to philosophical reasoning. The fiction of J.M. Coetzee makes a striking challenge to this tradition. While his writing has frequently engaged philosophical subjects in explicit ways, it has done so with an emphasis on the dissonance between literary expression and philosophical reasoning. And while Coetzee has often overtly engaged w...
Presents lucid and exemplary critical essays, introducing readers to J. M. Coetzee's works, practices, horizons and relations.
In The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee Jan Wilm analyses Coetzee's singular aesthetic style which, he argues, provokes the reader to read his works slowly. The effected 'slow reading' is developed into a method specifically geared to analyzing Coetzee's singular oeuvre, and it is shown that his works productively decelerate the reading process only to dynamize the reader's reflexion in a way that may be termed philosophical. Drawing on fresh archival material, this is the first study of its kind to explore Coetzee's writing process as already slow; as a program of seemingly relentless revision which brings forth his uniquely dense and crystalline style. Through the incorporation of material from drafts and notebooks, this study is also the first to combine an exploration of the writer's stylistic choices with a rigorous analysis of the reader's responses. The book includes close readings of Coetzee's popular and lesser known work, including Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians, Elizabeth Costello, Life and Times of Michael K and Slow Man.