Tag Archives: ethics

The Moral Philosophy of T.H. Green

1132913-L

It’s been some 25 years since my chum Geoff Thomas’ book was published. It holds the unusual distinction of being one of the very few Phds to be recommended to the OUP committee to publish as a book and it stands the test of time. The recommendation came from none other than Tony Quinton.

Examining Thomas Hill Green’s moral philosophy, Thomas defends a radically new perception of Green as an independent thinker rather than a devoted partisan of Kant or Hegel. Green’s moral philosophy, argues Thomas, includes a widely misunderstood defense of free will, an innovative model of deliberation that rejects both Kantian and Humean conceptions of practical reason, a barely recognized theory of character, and an account of moral objectivity that involves no dependence on religion–all of which yield a coherent body of moral philosophy that raises important problems neglected in contemporary ethics.

Leave a Comment

Philosophical Literature

4417557705_c3bcdec9ee_b

H/T to a kindred spirit “Infrequent literary reflections by an analytic philosopher” for bringing the slowly but surely growing secondary literature to my attention. Since it was through Kafka that my latent philosophical impulse was first generated, I’ve always wanted to write a piece on some aspect of his work. I have however been granted an opportunity to write on Musil for an upcoming conference – that will be this summer’s project. Paul writes:

I linked in my previous post to some items that connect Wittgenstein to literary themes.

Duncan Richter has a post about Wittgenstein and Kafka. In the comments to that post, there are recommendations of some additional work that involves Kafka and Wittgenstein. Richter refers to Rebecca Schuman’s paper, ‘”Unerschütterlich”: Kafka’s Proceß, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the Law of Logic’, which has now appeared in The German Quarterly. I know of one fictional work that puts Kafka and Wittgenstein together (very briefly). It’s a story by Guy Davenport called The Aeroplanes at Brescia.

Last fall, Ben Ware published ‘Ethics and the Literary in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the Journal for the History of Ideas. Ware there ‘explores the connections between the literary and the ethical in the book,’ and argues that ‘Wittgenstein hoped to achieve a practical rather than cognitive transformation in his readers’ lives.’

On another German lit front that involves Wittgenstein, Gwyneth Cliver’s 2008 dissertation, Musil, Broch, and the mathematics of modernism, has two chapters on Wittgenstein.

Leave a Comment

The Continuum Companion to Kant

14444507316768.universal.9781441112576

Here’s a plug for the aforementioned title notable, to me at least because my chum, inspiration, and occassional co-author, Christian Onof, has the following entries included:

  • Geometry, Mathematics
  • Transcendental Aesthetic
  • Antinomy
  • Categorical Imperative
  • Method
  • (either representation or a priori-a posteriori also made the final version)

There are also two short papers on:

  • Kant and Euler, and
  • Analytical Readings of Kant’s ethics
Leave a Comment

Kitcher reviews Parfit

Derek-Parfit-On-What-Matters

Philip Kitcher reviews Derek Parfit’s massive two-volume tome On What Matters.

Leave a Comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 215 other followers