Download or read book The Virtues of Freedom written by Paul Guyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected in this volume by Paul Guyer, one of the world's foremost Kant scholars, explore Kant's attempt to develop a morality grounded on the intrinsic and unconditional value of the human freedom to set our own ends. When regulated by the principle that the freedom of all is equally valuable, the freedom to set our own ends — what Kant calls "humanity" - becomes what he calls autonomy. These essays explore Kant's strategies for establishing the premise that freedom is the inner worth of the world or the essential end of humankind, as he says, and for deriving the specific duties that fundamental principle of morality generates in the empirical circumstances of human existence. The Virtues of Freedom further investigates Kant's attempts to prove that we are always free to live up to this moral ideal, that is, that we have free will no matter what, as well as his more successful explorations of the ways in which our natural tendencies to be moral — dispositions to the feeling of respect and more specific feelings such as love and self-esteem — can and must be cultivated and educated. Guyer finally examines the various models of human community that Kant develops from his premise that our associations must be based on the value of freedom for all. The contrasts but also similarities of Kant's moral philosophy to that of David Hume but many of his other predecessors and contemporaries, such as Stoics and Epicureans, Pufendorf and Wolff, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith, are also explored.
Download or read book The Art of Living written by Edward Sri and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book by bestselling author, Edward Sri, we discover the close connection between growing in the virtues and growing in friendship and community with others. A consummate teacher, Dr. Sri leads us through the virtues with engaging examples and an uncanny ability to anticipate and answer our most pressing questions. Dr. Sri shows us in his inimitable, easy-to-read style, that the virtues are the basic life skills we need to give the best of ourselves to God and to the people in our lives. In short, the practice of the virtues give us the freedom to love.
Download or read book Moral Freedom written by Alan Wolfe and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the traditional virtues of loyalty, honesty, self- restraint, and forgiveness, Wolfe (religion and American public life, Boston College) describes the state of contemporary moral thinking in the United States. He describes the struggle for individuals to forge a moral life without guidance from strict conventions. He considers the prevalent attitudes of eight American communities: from San Francisco's Castro district to the small-town environs of Tipton, Iowa, from Lackland Air Force Base to Fall River, Massachusetts. The cover shows shows the subtitle as The search for virtue in a world of choice, while the title page (and Library of Congress) cataloguing show The impossible idea that defines the way we live now. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book The Subject of Virtue written by James Laidlaw and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clearly written, sophisticated summary of and prospectus for a flourishing current field of anthropological research.
Download or read book Ordered Liberty written by James E. Fleming and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many have argued in recent years that the U.S. constitutional system exalts individual rights over responsibilities, virtues, and the common good. Answering the charges against liberal theories of rights, James Fleming and Linda McClain develop and defend a civic liberalism that takes responsibilities and virtues—as well as rights—seriously. They provide an account of ordered liberty that protects basic liberties stringently, but not absolutely, and permits government to encourage responsibility and inculcate civic virtues without sacrificing personal autonomy to collective determination. The battle over same-sex marriage is one of many current controversies the authors use to defend their understanding of the relationship among rights, responsibilities, and virtues. Against accusations that same-sex marriage severs the rights of marriage from responsible sexuality, procreation, and parenthood, they argue that same-sex couples seek the same rights, responsibilities, and goods of civil marriage that opposite-sex couples pursue. Securing their right to marry respects individual autonomy while also promoting moral goods and virtues. Other issues to which they apply their idea of civic liberalism include reproductive freedom, the proper roles and regulation of civil society and the family, the education of children, and clashes between First Amendment freedoms (of association and religion) and antidiscrimination law. Articulating common ground between liberalism and its critics, Fleming and McClain develop an account of responsibilities and virtues that appreciates the value of diversity in our morally pluralistic constitutional democracy.
Download or read book The Virtues of Freedom written by Paul Guyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected in this volume by Paul Guyer, one of the world's foremost Kant scholars, explore Kant's attempt to develop a morality grounded on the intrinsic and unconditional value of the human freedom to set our own ends. When regulated by the principle that the freedom of all is equally valuable, the freedom to set our own ends — what Kant calls "humanity" - becomes what he calls autonomy. These essays explore Kant's strategies for establishing the premise that freedom is the inner worth of the world or the essential end of humankind, as he says, and for deriving the specific duties that fundamental principle of morality generates in the empirical circumstances of human existence. The Virtues of Freedom further investigates Kant's attempts to prove that we are always free to live up to this moral ideal, that is, that we have free will no matter what, as well as his more successful explorations of the ways in which our natural tendencies to be moral — dispositions to the feeling of respect and more specific feelings such as love and self-esteem — can and must be cultivated and educated. Guyer finally examines the various models of human community that Kant develops from his premise that our associations must be based on the value of freedom for all. The contrasts but also similarities of Kant's moral philosophy to that of David Hume but many of his other predecessors and contemporaries, such as Stoics and Epicureans, Pufendorf and Wolff, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith, are also explored.
Download or read book Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism written by Peter Berkowitz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtue has been rediscovered in the United States as a subject of public debate and of philosophical inquiry. Politicians from both parties, leading intellectuals, and concerned citizens from diverse backgrounds are addressing questions about the content of our character. William Bennett's moral guide for children, A Book of Virtues, was a national bestseller. Yet many continue to associate virtue with a prudish, Victorian morality or with crude attempts by government to legislate morals. Peter Berkowitz clarifies the fundamental issues, arguing that a certain ambivalence toward virtue reflects the liberal spirit at its best. Drawing on recent scholarship as well as classical political philosophy, he makes his case with penetrating analyses of four central figures in the making of modern liberalism: Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill. These thinkers are usually understood to have neglected or disparaged virtue. Yet Berkowitz shows that they all believed that government resting on the fundamental premise of liberalism--the natural freedom and equality of all human beings--could not work unless citizens and officeholders possess particular qualities of mind and character. These virtues, which include reflective judgment, sympathetic imagination, self-restraint, the ability to cooperate, and toleration do not arise spontaneously but must be cultivated. Berkowitz explores the various strategies the thinkers employ as they seek to give virtue its due while respecting individual liberty. Liberals, he argues, must combine energy and forbearance, finding public and private ways to support such nongovernmental institutions as the family and voluntary associations. For these institutions, the liberal tradition powerfully suggests, play an indispensable role not only in forming the virtues on which liberal democracy depends but in overcoming the vices that it tends to engender. Clearly written and vigorously argued, this is a provocative work of political theory that speaks directly to complex issues at the heart of contemporary philosophy and public discussion. New Forum Books makes available to general readers outstanding, original, interdisciplinary scholarship with a special focus on the juncture of culture, law, and politics. New Forum Books is guided by the conviction that law and politics not only reflect culture, but help to shape it. Authors include leading political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, philosophers, theologians, historians, and economists writing for nonspecialist readers and scholars across a range of fields. Looking at questions such as political equality, the concept of rights, the problem of virtue in liberal politics, crime and punishment, population, poverty, economic development, and the international legal and political order, New Forum Books seeks to explain--not explain away--the difficult issues we face today.
Download or read book Red Round Globe Hot Burning written by Peter Linebaugh and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On February 21, 1803, Colonel Edward (Ned) Marcus Despard was publicly hanged and decapitated in London before a crowd of 20,000 for organizing a revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow King George III. His Black Caribbean wife, Catherine (Kate), helped to write his gallows speech in which he proclaimed that he was a friend to the poor and oppressed. He expressed trust that “the principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice will triumph over falsehood, tyranny, and delusion.” And yet the world turned. From the connected events of the American, French, Haitian, and failed Irish Revolutions, to the Anthropocene’s birth amidst enclosures, war-making global capitalism, slave labor plantations, and factory machine production, Red Round Globe Hot Burning throws readers into the pivotal moment of the last two millennia. This monumental history, packed with a wealth of detail, presents a comprehensive chronicle of the resistance to the demise of communal regimes. Peter Linebaugh’s extraordinary narrative recovers the death-defying heroism of extended networks of underground resisters fighting against privatization of the commons accomplished by two new political entities, the U.S.A. and the U.K., that we now know would dispossess people around the world through today. Red Round Globe Hot Burning is the culmination of a lifetime of research—encapsulated through an epic tale of love.
Download or read book Virtues of Independence and Dependence on Virtues written by Ludvig Beckman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-27 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debate about the concept of virtue is a persistent theme in academic discourse. One strand of thinking attempts to examine and reconstruct ethical theories with the aim of formulating a new morality or ethics. A second strand of thought, more strongly represented in this work, attempts to explore the social and political world deploying the concept of virtue. Thus, this volume crosses the established borders of academic disciplines in order to provide a richer and more comprehensive understanding of the place of virtues in contemporary western societies.The editors hold that the dominating virtue of our culture and society is the virtue of independence. Yet independence, or individual autonomy, is contingent upon a diverse, and so far ill-understood, set of cultural, biological, economic, ethical, and political practices. The idea of individuality is in other words supervening on a web of formal and informal relations. This volume therefore attempts to improve our understanding of the prevailing ethos of independence as well as of the mechanisms and practices sustaining it.Virtues are examined in specific contexts. Authors explore what we can learn about our dependence on virtues from the archaic Greek culture. They examine the relevance of virtue-ethics to the understanding of day-to-day practices. And they look at the place of virtues in understanding the norms of independence and liberty. Other contributions attend to the virtues of independence and its challenges, examining possible philosophical challenges, questioning whether independence is always a virtue, and how the virtues of justice fare given a commitment to the virtues of independence.The final portion of the book explore the empirical consequences of the virtues of independence. Among the questions addressed are how personal independence affects political and economic institutions, and the connections between norms of independence and the growth of modernity. This volume is an important contribution to contemporary understanding of what constitutes virtuous and ethical behavior.
Download or read book Interior Freedom written by Jacques Philippe and published by Scepter Publishers. This book was released on 2017-03-29 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interior Freedom leads one to discover that even in the most unfavorable outward circumstances we possess within ourselves a space of freedom that nobody can take away, because God is its source and guarantee. Without this discovery we will always be restricted in some way and will never taste true happiness. Author Jacques Philippe develops a simple but important theme: we gain possession of our interior freedom in exact proportion to our growth in faith, hope, and love. He explains that the dynamism between these three theological virtues is the heart of the spiritual life, and he underlines the key role of the virtue of hope in our inner growth. Written in a simple and inviting style, Interior Freedom seeks to liberate the heart and mind to live the true freedom to which God calls each one.
Download or read book If You Can Keep It written by Eric Metaxas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 New York Times bestselling author Eric Metaxas delivers an extraordinary book that is part history and part rousing call to arms, steeped in a critical analysis of our founding fathers' original intentions for America. In 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, a woman asked Ben Franklin what the founders had given the American people. "A republic," he shot back, "if you can keep it." More than two centuries later, Metaxas examines what that means and how we are doing on that score. If You Can Keep It is at once a thrilling review of America's uniqueness—including our role as a "nation of nations"—and a chilling reminder that America's greatness cannot continue unless we embrace our own crucial role in living out what the founders entrusted to us. Metaxas explains that America is not a nation bounded by ethnic identity or geography, but rather by a radical and unprecedented idea, based on liberty and freedom for all. He cautions us that it's nearly past time we reconnect to that idea, or we may lose the very foundation of what made us exceptional in the first place.
Download or read book The Virtue Driven Life written by Benedict Groeschel and published by Our Sunday Visitor. This book was released on 2006-09-22 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since when is being called "virtuous" an insult? It's a word that has gotten a bad rap, misused and misunderstood even by great thinkers, philosophers, and theologians, and mocked in the cynical sound bites of the media. Rediscover virtue as it should be understood in our lives. With wit, warmth, and wisdom, Father Groeschel reintroduces the seven virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and charity. One by one he makes them meaningful for modern men and women, shaking off the dusty mantle of pretentiousness and demonstrating how each has a real role in a whole and holy life. Father Groeschel's charming conversational style entertains even as he educates and challenges us. History, politics, an advertisement, the neighbor down the street ... all are reference points for Father Groeschel as he explores the meaning of each virtue for Christians today. By the end of the book, you will understand that being labeled virtuous is the ultimate compliment!
Download or read book The Bourgeois Virtues written by Deirdre Nansen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner.
Download or read book The Catholic Gentleman written by Sam Guzman and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What it means to be a man or a woman is questioned today like never before. While traditional gender roles have been eroding for decades, now the very categories of male and female are being discarded with reckless abandon. How does one act like a gentleman in such confusing times? The Catholic Gentleman is a solid and practical guide to virtuous manhood. It turns to the timeless wisdom of the Catholic Church to answer the important questions men are currently asking. In short, easy- to-read chapters, the author offers pithy insights on a variety of topics, including • How to know you are an authentic man • Why our bodies matter • The value of tradition • The purpose of courtesy • What real holiness is and how to achieve it • How to deal with failure in the spiritual life
Download or read book American Virtues written by Jean M. Yarbrough and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 1998-09-25 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early days of the republic, Americans have recognized Thomas Jefferson's distinctive role in helping to shape the American national character. As Founder and statesman, Jefferson thought broadly about the virtues Americans would need to cultivate in order to preserve and perfect their experiment in republican self-government. Now in an age preoccupied with rights and divided over questions of character in public and private life, Jefferson can help us to think more clearly about our most urgent concerns. American Virtues is the first comprehensive analysis of Jefferson's moral and political philosophy in over twenty years and the first ever to focus exclusively on the full range of moral, civic, and intellectual virtues that together form the American character. It asks what kind of character Americans as a people must cultivate to ensure their freedom and happiness and how we as a free society can nurture moral and intellectual excellence in our citizens and statesmen. Beginning with the Declaration of Independence, Jean Yarbrough explores how Jefferson's conception of rights helps to form the American character. In subsequent chapters, she examines the moral sense virtues of justice and benevolence; the "agrarian" virtues of industry, moderation, patience, self-reliance, and independence; patriotism and modern republicanism; slavery and agrarian vice; the effect of commerce on character; the virtues connected with private property; the civic virtues of vigilance and spirited participation; the meaning of virtue and happiness for women; the virtues of republican statesmen; the place of the Epicurean virtues of wisdom and friendship in liberal republicanism; and piety and the secularized virtues of charity, toleration, and hope. In broadening the examination of virtue to include not only civic or republican virtue but the whole range of moral and intellectual excellence that perfect the individual character, American Virtues moves beyond the liberal-republican debates and makes a fresh contribution to the Jeffersonian literature.
Download or read book Freedom Virtue and the Common Good written by Anthony O. Simon and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the recovery of natural law and virtue ethics in recent ethical discourse, certain members of the American Maritain Association have written essays to stimulate this recovery further. Their efforts are assembled in this volume, Freedom, Virtue, and the Common Good. Writing under the influence of Jacques Maritain and Yves R. Simon, they herein examine the requirements of a satisfactory natural law and virtue ethics, broadly understood as a moral philosophy giving primacy to character-formation and to the development of individual and social habits necessary to perfect human life. The ethics herein envisioned is one that must first be grounded in a sound philosophy of the human person.
Download or read book Toward a Free and Virtuous Society written by Robert A. Sirico and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
