Download or read book Sacrifice and Moral Philosophy written by Marcel van Ackeren and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to foster a more explicit and direct discussion of the concept of sacrifice and its importance in moral philosophy. Acts of self-sacrifice have a special place in our moral lives. We admire and celebrate those who give up their lives so that others may live. Despite this important role that sacrifice plays in our moral thinking, moral philosophers have had surprisingly little to say about the nature of sacrifice. This lack of attention to the nature of sacrifice is particularly important given that sacrifice also has an important role to play in several key debates in moral philosophy. The chapters in this volume make an important contribution to our understanding of sacrifice in three areas. The first part of the book investigates the nature of sacrifice. The next group of chapters investigates the role of sacrifice in moral philosophy. Three of these pieces investigate the role of sacrifice in our moral lives generally, while two investigate the role of sacrifice in relation to particular moral theories. The final two chapters investigate the value of sacrifice in relation to political and theological issues. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.
Download or read book On Sacrifice written by Moshe Halbertal and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-26 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea and practice of sacrifice play a profound role in religion, ethics, and politics. In this brief book, philosopher Moshe Halbertal explores the meaning and implications of sacrifice, developing a theory of sacrifice as an offering and examining the relationship between sacrifice, ritual, violence, and love. On Sacrifice also looks at the place of self-sacrifice within ethical life and at the complex role of sacrifice as both a noble and destructive political ideal. In the religious domain, Halbertal argues, sacrifice is an offering, a gift given in the context of a hierarchical relationship. As such it is vulnerable to rejection, a trauma at the root of both ritual and violence. An offering is also an ambiguous gesture torn between a genuine expression of gratitude and love and an instrument of exchange, a tension that haunts the practice of sacrifice. In the moral and political domains, sacrifice is tied to the idea of self-transcendence, in which an individual sacrifices his or her self-interest for the sake of higher values and commitments. While self-sacrifice has great potential moral value, it can also be used to justify the most brutal acts. Halbertal attempts to unravel the relationship between self-sacrifice and violence, arguing that misguided self-sacrifice is far more problematic than exaggerated self-love. In his exploration of the positive and negative dimensions of self-sacrifice, Halbertal also addresses the role of past sacrifice in obligating future generations and in creating a bond for political associations, and considers the function of the modern state as a sacrificial community.
Download or read book Sacrifice Regained written by Roger Crisp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-21 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does being virtuous make you happy? In this book, Roger Crisp examines the answers to this ancient question provided by the so-called 'British Moralists', from Thomas Hobbes, around 1650, for the next two hundred years, until Jeremy Bentham. This involves elucidating their views on happiness (self-interest, or well-being) and on virtue (or morality), in order to bring out the relation of each to the other. Themes ran through many of these writers: psychological egoism, evaluative hedonism, and - after Hobbes - the acceptance of self-standing moral reasons. But there are exceptions, and even those taking the standard views adopt them for very different reasons and express them in various ways. As the ancients tended to believe that virtue and happiness largely coincide, so these modern authors are inclined to accept posthumous reward and punishment. Both positions sit uneasily with the common-sense idea that a person can truly sacrifice their own good for the sake of morality or for others. Roger Crisp shows that David Hume - a hedonist whose ethics made no appeal to the afterlife - was the first major British moralist to allow for, indeed to recommend, such self-sacrifice. Morality and well-being of course remain central to modern ethics, and Crisp demonstrates how much there is to learn from this remarkable group of philosophers.
Download or read book Sacrifice and Value written by Sidney Axinn and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2010-10-14 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacrifice and Value: A Kantian Interpretation argues that we create values by making sacrifices. Values don't exist outside of us; they exist only when we give a gift without expecting a return. As Sidney Axinn demonstrates, we must have values in order to make decisions, to have friends or lovers, and to choose goals of any sort. Sacrifice is basic to almost everything of importance: care, love, religion, patriotism, loyalties, warfare, friendship, gift giving, morality. Axin uses Aristotle, Cicero, and Kant, and contemporary philosophers Oldenquest, Frankfurt, Friedman, Starobinski and others to analyze the role of sacrifice. A novel feature is the attention given to Kant's use of sacrifice. Sacrifice and Value will interest advanced students and scholars of philosophy_particularly value theory and moral theory_as well as women's studies, religion, political theory, and psychology.
Download or read book Anthropology as Ethics written by T. M. S. Evens and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology as Ethics is concerned with rethinking anthropology by rethinking the nature of reality. It develops the ontological implications of a defining thesis of the Manchester School: that all social orders exhibit basically conflicting underlying principles. Drawing especially on Continental social thought, including Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Dumont, Bourdieu and others, and on pre-modern sources such as the Hebrew bible, the Nuer, the Dinka, and the Azande, the book mounts a radical study of the ontology of self and other in relation to dualism and nondualism. It demonstrates how the self-other dichotomy disguises fundamental ambiguity or nondualism, thus obscuring the essentially ethical, dilemmatic, and sacrificial nature of all social life. It also proposes a reason other than dualist, nihilist, and instrumental, one in which logic is seen as both inimical to and continuous with value. Without embracing absolutism, the book makes ambiguity and paradox the foundation of an ethical response to the pervasive anti-foundationalism of much postmodern thought. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester in 1971. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the University of Calcutta, and Asmara University, Eritrea. He is author of Two Kinds of Rationality: Kibbutz Democracy and Generational Conflict (1995), and co-editor of the collections, Transcendence in Society: Case Studies (1990) and The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology (2006). Drawn especially to theory and phenomenology, he has sought from the beginnings of his professional career to isolate, identify, and critically explore philosophical underpinnings of empirical anthropology.
Download or read book Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship written by Lorraine Smith Pangle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-14 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive account of the major philosophical works on friendship and its relationship to self-love. The book gives central place to Aristotle's searching examination of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Lorraine Pangle argues that the difficulties surrounding this discussion are soon dispelled once one understands the purpose of the Ethics as both a source of practical guidance for life and a profound, theoretical investigation into human nature. The book also provides fresh interpretations of works on friendship by Plato, Cicero, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne and Bacon. The author shows how each of these thinkers sheds light on central questions of moral philosophy: is human sociability rooted in neediness or strength? is the best life chiefly solitary, or dedicated to a community with others? Clearly structured and engagingly written, this book will appeal to a broad swathe of readers across philosophy, classics and political science.
Download or read book Sacrifice written by Inge van Nistelrooij and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caring is a moral practice, i.e. a practice in which moral goods are realized. This is one of the critical insights of the ethics of care. The idea that goods are also sacrificed in caregiving, however, is less accepted or downright rejected. Starting off with real life stories, stories from literature and films, this book shows that caregiving entails sacrifices even to the extent of sacrificing the self. This study argues that concepts surrounding care and sacrifice need to be revised and makes proposals for re-conceptualizing the subject's identity, the intersubjective relation, the socio-political community, and the role of meaning. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon the ethics of care, theology, phenomenology, political theory and hermeneutics, this book leads to a reappraisal of (self-)sacrifice as vital to understanding caring.
Download or read book Virtue Ethics Retrospect and Prospect written by Elisa Grimi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of the phenomenon of virtue ethics in recent years has increased at a rapid pace. Such an explosion carries with it a number of great possibilities, as well as risks. This volume has been written to contribute a multi-faceted perspective to the current conversation about virtue. Among many other thought-provoking questions, the collection addresses the following: What are the virtues, and how are they enumerated? What are the internal problems among ethicists, and what are the objections and replies to contemporary virtue ethics? Additionally, the practical implications following from the answers to these questions are discussed in new and fascinating research. Fundamental concepts such as teleology and eudaimonism are addressed from both a historical and dialectical approach. This tome will contribute not only to providing further clarity to the current horizons in virtue ethics, but also to the practical conclusion following from the study: to challenge the reader toward a greater pursuit of the virtuous life.
Download or read book In Defense of Selfishness written by Peter Schwartz and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From childhood, we're taught one central, non-controversial idea about morality: self-sacrifice is a virtue. It is universally accepted that serving the needs of others, rather than our own, is the essence of morality. To be ethical—it is believed—is to be altruistic. Questioning this belief is regarded as tantamount to questioning the self-evident. Here, Peter Schwartz questions it. In Defense of Selfishness refutes widespread misconceptions about the meaning of selfishness and of altruism. Basing his arguments on Ayn Rand's ethics of rational self-interest, Schwartz demonstrates that genuine selfishness is not exemplified by the brutal plundering of an Attila the Hun or the conniving duplicity of a Bernard Madoff. To the contrary, such people are acting against their actual, long-range interests. The truly selfish individual is committed to moral principles and lives an honest, productive, self-respecting life. He does not feed parasitically off other people. Instead, he renounces the unearned, and deals with others—in both the material and spiritual realms—by offering value for value, to mutual benefit. The selfish individual, Schwartz maintains, lives by reason, not force. He lives by production and trade, not by theft and fraud. He disavows the mindlessness of the do-whatever-you-feel-like emotionalist, and upholds rationality as his primary virtue. He takes pride in his achievements, and does not sacrifice himself to others—nor does he sacrifice others to himself. According to the code of altruism, however, you must embrace self-sacrifice. You must subordinate yourself to others. Altruism calls, not for cooperation and benevolence, but for servitude. It demands that you surrender your interests to the needs of others, that you regard serving others as the moral justification of your existence, that you be willing to suffer so that a non-you might benefit. To this, Schwartz asks simply: Why? Why should the fact that you have achieved any success make you indebted to those who haven't? Why does the fact that someone needs your money create a moral entitlement to it, while the fact that you've earned it, doesn't? Using vivid, real-life examples, In Defense of Selfishness illustrates the iniquity of requiring one man to serve the needs of another. This provocative book challenges readers to re-examine the standard by which they decide what is morally right or wrong.
Download or read book Sacrifice in Judaism Christianity and Islam written by David L. Weddle and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the practice and philosophy of sacrifice in three religious traditions In the book of Genesis, God tests the faith of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham by demanding that he sacrifice the life of his beloved son, Isaac. Bound by common admiration for Abraham, the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also promote the practice of giving up human and natural goods to attain religious ideals. Each tradition negotiates the moral dilemmas posed by Abraham’s story in different ways, while retaining the willingness to perform sacrifice as an identifying mark of religious commitment. This book considers the way in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims refer to “sacrifice”—not only as ritual offerings, but also as the donation of goods, discipline, suffering, and martyrdom. Weddle highlights objections to sacrifice within these traditions as well, presenting voices of dissent and protest in the name of ethical duty. Sacrifice forfeits concrete goods for abstract benefits, a utopian vision of human community, thereby sparking conflict with those who do not share the same ideals. Weddle places sacrifice in the larger context of the worldviews of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, using this nearly universal religious act as a means of examining similarities of practice and differences of meaning among these important world religions. This book takes the concept of sacrifice across these three religions, and offers a cross-cultural approach to understanding its place in history and deep-rooted traditions.
Download or read book Sacrifice Regained written by Roger Crisp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does being virtuous make you happy? In this book, Roger Crisp examines the answers to this ancient question provided by the so-called 'British Moralists', from Thomas Hobbes, around 1650, for the next two hundred years, until Jeremy Bentham. This involves elucidating their views on happiness (self-interest, or well-being) and on virtue (or morality), in order to bring out the relation of each to the other. Themes ran through many of these writers: psychological egoism, evaluative hedonism, and - after Hobbes - the acceptance of self-standing moral reasons. But there are exceptions, and even those taking the standard views adopt them for very different reasons and express them in various ways. As the ancients tended to believe that virtue and happiness largely coincide, so these modern authors are inclined to accept posthumous reward and punishment. Both positions sit uneasily with the common-sense idea that a person can truly sacrifice their own good for the sake of morality or for others. Roger Crisp shows that David Hume - a hedonist whose ethics made no appeal to the afterlife - was the first major British moralist to allow for, indeed to recommend, such self-sacrifice. Morality and well-being of course remain central to modern ethics, and Crisp demonstrates how much there is to learn from this remarkable group of philosophers.
Download or read book On Sacrifice written by Moshe Halbertal and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-26 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea and practice of sacrifice play a profound role in religion, ethics, and politics. In this brief book, philosopher Moshe Halbertal explores the meaning and implications of sacrifice, developing a theory of sacrifice as an offering and examining the relationship between sacrifice, ritual, violence, and love. On Sacrifice also looks at the place of self-sacrifice within ethical life and at the complex role of sacrifice as both a noble and destructive political ideal. In the religious domain, Halbertal argues, sacrifice is an offering, a gift given in the context of a hierarchical relationship. As such it is vulnerable to rejection, a trauma at the root of both ritual and violence. An offering is also an ambiguous gesture torn between a genuine expression of gratitude and love and an instrument of exchange, a tension that haunts the practice of sacrifice. In the moral and political domains, sacrifice is tied to the idea of self-transcendence, in which an individual sacrifices his or her self-interest for the sake of higher values and commitments. While self-sacrifice has great potential moral value, it can also be used to justify the most brutal acts. Halbertal attempts to unravel the relationship between self-sacrifice and violence, arguing that misguided self-sacrifice is far more problematic than exaggerated self-love. In his exploration of the positive and negative dimensions of self-sacrifice, Halbertal also addresses the role of past sacrifice in obligating future generations and in creating a bond for political associations, and considers the function of the modern state as a sacrificial community.
Download or read book Moral Philosophy A Contemporary Introduction written by Daniel R. DeNicola and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction is a compact yet comprehensive book offering an explication and critique of the major theories that have shaped philosophical ethics. Engaging with both historical and contemporary figures, this book explores the scope, limits, and requirements of morality. DeNicola traces our various attempts to ground morality: in nature, in religion, in culture, in social contracts, and in aspects of the human person such as reason, emotions, caring, and intuition.
Download or read book Peter Singer Under Fire written by Jeffrey A. Schaler and published by Open Court. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the leading ethical thinkers of the modern age, Peter Singer has repeatedly been embroiled in controversy. Protesters in Germany closed down his lectures, mistakenly thinking he was advocating Nazi views on eugenics. Conservative publisher Steve Forbes withdrew generous donations to Princeton after Singer was appointed professor of bioethics. His belief that infanticide is sometimes morally justified has appalled people from all walks of life. Peter Singer Under Fire gives a platform to his critics on many contentious issues. Leaders of the disability rights group Not Dead Yet attack Singer’s views on disability and euthanasia. Economists criticize the effectiveness of his ideas for solving global poverty. Philosophers expose problems in Singer’s theory of utilitarianism and ethicists refute his position on abortion. Singer’s engaging “Intellectual Autobiography” explains how he came by his controversial views, while detailed replies to each critic reveal further surprising aspects of his unique outlook.
Download or read book The Ayn Rand Lexicon written by Ayn Rand and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prolific writer, bestselling novelist, and world-renowned philosopher, Ayn Rand defined a full system of thought--from epistemology to aesthetics. Her writing is so extensive and the range of issues she covers so enormous that those interested in finding her discussions of a given topic may have to search through many sources to locate the relevant passage. The Ayn Rand Lexicon brings together all the key ideas of her philosophy of Objectivism. Begun under Rand's supervision, this unique volume is an invaluable guide to her philosophy or reason, self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism--the philosophy so brilliantly dramatized in her novels The Fountainhead, We the Living, and Anthem.
Download or read book Family Sacrifices written by Russell M. Jeung and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-two percent of Chinese Americans report having no religious affiliation, making them the least religiously-identified ethnic group in the United States. But that statistic obscures a much more complex reality. Family Sacrifices reveals that Chinese Americans employ familism, not religion, as the primary narrative by which they find meaning, identity, and belonging. As a transpacific lived tradition, Chinese American familism prioritizes family above other commitments and has roots in Chinese Popular Religion and Confucianism. The spiritual and ethical systems of China emphasize practicing rituals and cultivating virtue, whereas American religious research usually focuses on belief in the supernatural or belonging to a religious tradition. To address this gap in understanding, Family Sacrifices introduces the concept of liyi, translated as ritual propriety and righteous relations. Re-appropriated from its original Chinese usage, liyi offers a new way of understanding Chinese religion and a new lens for understanding the emergence of religious "nones" in the United States. The first book based on national survey data on Asian American religious practices, Family Sacrifices is a seminal text on the fastest-growing racial group in the United States.
Download or read book Concealment and Revelation written by Moshe Halbertal and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great new trends of Jewish thought emerged whose widely varied representatives--Kabbalists, philosophers, and astrologers--each claimed that their particular understanding revealed the actual secret of the Torah. They presented their own readings in a coded fashion that has come to be regarded by many as the very essence of esotericism. Concealment and Revelation takes us on a fascinating journey to the depths of the esoteric imagination. Carefully tracing the rise of esotericism and its function in medieval Jewish thought, Moshe Halbertal's richly detailed historical and cultural analysis gradually builds conceptual-philosophical force to culminate in a masterful phenomenological taxonomy of esotericism and its paradoxes. Among the questions addressed: What are the internal justifications that esoteric traditions provide for their own existence, especially in the Jewish world, in which the spread of knowledge was of great importance? How do esoteric teachings coexist with the revealed tradition, and what is the relationship between the various esoteric teachings that compete with that revealed tradition? Halbertal concludes that, through the medium of the concealed, Jewish thinkers integrated into the heart of the Jewish tradition diverse cultural influences such as Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticisims. And the creation of an added concealed layer, unregulated and open-ended, became the source of the most daring and radical interpretations of the tradition.
