Abstract
Ethics as a philosophical discipline is back in vogue in the English-speaking world. Ever since the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice 1 moral philosophy has undergone a remarkable resurgence. One need only to review job advertisements over the last several years to note how great is the percentage of available positions in philosophy devoted to ethics. Courses in ethics and a concentration on “values” have been revived as centerpieces of liberal education. This development was spurred not only by Rawls and his successors, but by our need to respond to the various ethical issues posed by the technological explosion of the last century. Indeed, we have seen the rise of whole new fields of “applied ethics,” such as bioethics and environmental ethics. Against the background of this revival, one of the central aims of this handbook is to show the great fertility of the phenomenological tradition for the study of ethics by collecting a set of papers on the contributions to ethical thought by major phenomenological thinkers. Most of the chapters in the book, therefore, sketch the thought of the major ethical thinkers in previous generations of the phenomenological tradition and direct the reader toward the most relevant primary and secondary materials. Other chapters sketch more recent developments in various parts of the world, and three chapters explore the relations between phenomenology and the dominant normative approaches in contemporary moral philosophy.
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References
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
Paul Ricoeur is a good example of a phenomenologist who uses these terms in this manner; cf. his Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 169–71.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in his Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 5.
James G. Hart speaks of this “taking stock”of our moral lives and their significance as the “ethical reduction”; cf. his The Person and the Common Life: Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 26–34.
Cf. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans, and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 4: 398-99. References to Kant’s writings use the pagination of the Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften; this pagination is reproduced in the margins of Gregor’s translation.
To mention only a few examples, consider Martha C. Nussbaum, “Aristotelian Social Democracy,” in Liberalism and the Good, ed. R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 203–52.
Martha C. Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume XIII, Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 32–53.
revised and expanded in Martha C. Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,” in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 242–69.
Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Martha C. Nussbaum, “For Love of Country,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Sherman, “Concrete Kantian Respect,” Social Philosophy and Policy 15 (1998): 119–48.
Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Christine M. Korsgaard with G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard William, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Respect, Pluralism, and Justice: Kantian Perspectives (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2000).
and Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik, in his Gesammelte Werke, ed. Maria Scheler and Manfred S. Frings, 15 vols. (Bern: Francke, 1954-85; Bonn: Bouvier, 1986-97)2: 88-89; Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 68.
For a discussion of Husserl’s account of our awareness of the a priori, cf. John J. Drummond, “Synthesis, identity, and the a priori,” Recherches husserliennes 4 (1995): 27–51.
Scheler, Formalismus, 218ff. (203ff.); cf. Nicolai Hartmann, Ethik, 3rd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1949), 171; Ethics, trans. Stanton Coit, 3 vols. (New York, Humanities Press, 1967), 1:248.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,”in Continental Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. William McNeill and Karen S. Feldman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), 181.
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Drummond, J.J. (2002). Introduction: The Phenomenological Tradition and Moral Philosophy. In: Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 47. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9924-5_1
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