Ethical Formation

by Sabina Lovibond

Overview

Sabina Lovibond invites her readers to see how the "practical reason view of ethics" can survive challenges from within philosophy and from the antirationalist postmodern critique of reason.

She elaborates and defends a modern practical-reason view of ethics by focusing on virtue or ideal states of character that involve sensitivity to the objective reasons circumstances bring into play. At the heart of her argument is the Aristotelian idea of the formation of character through upbringing; these ancient ideas can be made contemporary if one understands them in a naturalized way. She then explores the implications that arise from the naturalization of the classical view, weaving into her theory ideas of Jacques Derrida and J. L. Austin. The book also discusses two modes of resistance to an existing ethical culture—one committed to the critical employment of shared norms of rationality, the other aspiring to a more radical attitude, grounded in hostility to the "universal." Lovibond tries to determine what may be correct in this second, admittedly paradoxical, tendency.

This is a timely and valuable effort to connect the most advanced forms of thinking in the analytic tradition and in the Continental tradition, and to extend our understanding of the intimacies and resistances between these two prominent strands of contemporary philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674013650
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.69(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Sabina Lovibond is a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Worcester College, Oxford, and the author of Realism and Imagination in Ethics.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

PART I: FORM

1. The Practical Reason View of Ethics

2. Practical Wisdom Scrutinized

3. Form, Formlessness, and Rule-Following

PART II: TELEOLOGY

4. Why Be "Serious"? The Natural Basis of Our Interest in a "Rational Self"

5. On Being the Author of a Moral Judgement

6. The "Intelligible Ground of the Heart"

PART III: COUNTER-TELEOLOGY

7. The Determinate Critique of Ethical Formation

8. The Violence of Reason?

9. Reason and Unreason: A Problematic Distinction

Index

Editorial Reviews

This is an intricate and stimulating book...an argument that is impressive in its coherence and subtlety, and in the insightful way it engages with issues that are right at the centre of contemporary philosophical debate.

Times Literary Supplement - John Cottingham

This is an intricate and stimulating book...an argument that is impressive in its coherence and subtlety, and in the insightful way it engages with issues that are right at the centre of contemporary philosophical debate.
— John Cottingham

Times Literary Supplement