Download or read book A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind written by Michael Slote and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Slote argues that emotion is involved in all human thought and action on conceptual grounds, rather than merely being causally connected with other aspects of the mind. This kind of general sentimentalism about the mind goes beyond that advocated by Hume, and the book's main arguments are only partially anticipated in German Romanticism and in the Chinese philosophical tendency to avoid rigid distinctions between thought and emotion. The new sentimentalist philosophy of mind Slote proposes can solve important problems about the nature of belief and action that other approaches -- including Pragmatism -- fail to address. In arguing for the centrality of emotion within philosophy of the mind, A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind continues the critique of rationalist philosophical views that began with Slote's Moral Sentimentalism (OUP, 2010) and continued in his From Enlightenment to Receptivity (OUP, 2013). This new book also delves into what is distinctive about human minds, arguing that there is a greater variety to ordinary human motives than has been recognized and that emotions play a central role in this complex psychology.
Download or read book The Theory of Moral Sentiments written by Adam Smith (économiste) and published by . This book was released on 1812 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ethical Sentimentalism written by Remy Debes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there has been a tremendous resurgence of interest in ethical sentimentalism, a moral theory first articulated during the Scottish Enlightenment. Ethical Sentimentalism promises a conception of morality that is grounded in a realistic account of human psychology, which, correspondingly, acknowledges the central place of emotion in our moral lives. However, this promise has encountered its share of philosophical difficulties. Chief among them is the question of how to square the limited scope of human motivation and psychological mechanism - so easily influenced by personal, social, and cultural circumstance - with the seeming universal scope and objective nature of moral judgment. The essays in this volume provide a comprehensive evaluation of the sentimentalist project with a particular eye to this difficulty. Each essay offers critical clarification, innovative answers to central challenges, and new directions for ethical sentimentalism in general.
Download or read book Moral Sentimentalism written by Michael Slote and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-05 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has recently been a good deal of interest in moral sentimentalism, but most of that interest has been exclusively either in metaethical questions about the meaning of moral terms or in normative issues about benevolence and/or caring and their place in morality. In Moral Sentimentalism Michael Slote attempts to deal with both sorts of issues and to do so, primarily, in terms of the notion or phenomenon of empathy. Hume sought to do something like this over two centuries ago, though he didn't have the term "empathy" and used "sympathy" instead; and in effect Slote is seeking to give moral sentimentalism a "second wind" in and for contemporary circumstances. By relying systematically on empathy in its account of normative morality and in what it has to say about the meaning of moral vocabulary, Moral Sentimentalism offers a unified overall ethical picture that can then be tested against ethical rationalism. Rationalism has recently dominated the scene in ethics, but by showing how sentimentalism can make coherent and intuitive sense of such preferred rationalist notions as autonomy, respect, and justice--and by showing how a sentimentalism based in empathy can deal with ethically significant aspects of the moral life that rationalism tends to ignore or skimp on--Slote hopes a wider and more active debate between rationalism and sentimentalism can be set in motion. There are signs that sentimentalist modes of thought are gaining new footholds on the way ethics is done, and this new book is very hopeful about these possibilities.
Download or read book From Enlightenment to Receptivity written by Michael Slote and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have received a great deal of philosophical and public attention, but both these notions rest on the deeper and broader value of receptivity, and in From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Slote seeks to show that we need to focus more on receptivity if we are to attain a more balanced sense and understanding of what is important to us. Beginning with a critique of Enlightenment thinking that calls into question its denial of any central role to considerations of emotion and empathy, he goes on to show how a greater emphasis on these factors and on the receptivity that underlies them can give us a more realistic, balanced, and sensitive understanding of our core ethical and epistemological values. This means rejecting post-modernism's blanket rejection of reason and of compelling real values and recognizing, rather, that receptivity should play a major role in how we lead our lives as individuals, in how we relate to nature, in how we acquire knowledge about the world, and in how we relate morally and politically with others.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book On Moral Sentimentalism written by Neil Roughley and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Slote has long been one of the foremost contributors to discussions in moral theory. Both his work on consequentialism and his particular version of virtue ethics have been highly influential. In recent years, Slote has developed a distinctive and original voice, placing his various theoretical endeavours under the title of â oesentimentalismâ . His key ethical work in this context is Moral Sentimentalism, which, uniquely, defends versions of both a metaethical and aretaic sentimentalist theory. The present volume is an extended discussion of that work, containing eight original commentaries and a substantial response by Slote, which provide fresh insights into his position. The collection will be of significant value to anyone interested in contemporary debates in meta-ethics or normative ethics.
Download or read book The Enlightenment of Sympathy written by Michael L. Frazer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-18 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment of Sympathy reclaims the sentimentalist theory of reflective autonomy as a resource for enriching social science, normative theory, and political practice today. The sentimentalist description of the reflective process is more empirically accurate than the competing rationalist description, and can guide scientists investigating the processes by which the mind formulates moral and political principles. Yet the theory is much more than merely descriptive, and can also contribute to the philosophical project of finding principles--including principles of justice--that wield genuine normative authority. Enlightenment sentimentalism demonstrates that emotion is necessarily central to our civic life, and shows how our reflective sentiments can counterbalance the unreflective feelings that might otherwise lead our political principles astray.
Download or read book Neo Confucianism written by JeeLoo Liu and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-06-19 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solidly grounded in Chinese primary sources, Neo Confucianism: Metaphysics, Mind, and Morality engages the latest global scholarship to provide an innovative, rigorous, and clear articulation of neo-Confucianism and its application to Western philosophy. Contextualizes neo-Confucianism for contemporary analytic philosophy by engaging with today’s philosophical questions and debates Based on the most recent and influential scholarship on neo-Confucianism, and supported by primary texts in Chinese and cross-cultural secondary literature Presents a cohesive analysis of neo-Confucianism by investigating the metaphysical foundations of neo-Confucian perspectives on the relationship between human nature, human mind, and morality Offers innovative interpretations of neo-Confucian terminology and examines the ideas of eight major philosophers, from Zhou Dunyi and Cheng-Zhu to Zhang Zai and Wang Fuzhi Approaches neo-Confucian concepts in an penetrating yet accessible way
Download or read book An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals written by David Hume and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sentimental Citizen written by George E. Marcus and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Analysis Of How emotion functions cooperatively with reason & contributes to a healthy democratic politics.
Download or read book Sentimental Rules written by Shaun Nichols and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2004-11-04 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shaun Nichols' theory is that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgement, in that the norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms.
Download or read book Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind written by Joshua May and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The burgeoning science of ethics has produced a trend toward pessimism. Ordinary moral thought and action, we're told, are profoundly influenced by arbitrary factors and ultimately driven by unreasoned feelings. This book counters the current orthodoxy on its own terms by carefully engaging with the empirical literature. The resulting view, optimistic rationalism, shows the pervasive role played by reason our moral minds, and ultimately defuses sweeping debunking arguments in ethics. The science does suggest that moral knowledge and virtue don't come easily. However, despite the heavy influence of automatic and unconscious processes that have been shaped by evolutionary pressures, we needn't reject ordinary moral psychology as fundamentally flawed or in need of serious repair. Reason can be corrupted in ethics just as in other domains, but a special pessimism about morality in particular is unwarranted. Moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally rational enterprises not beholden to the passions.
Download or read book What is an Emotion written by Dr. William James and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I should say first of all that the only emotions I propose expressly to consider here are those that have a distinct bodily expression. That there are feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of interest and excitement, bound up with mental operations, but having no obvious bodily expression for their consequence, would, I suppose, be held true by most readers. Certain arrangements of sounds, of lines, of colours are agreeable, and others the reverse, without the degree of the feeling being sufficient to quicken the pulse or breathing, or to prompt to movements of either the body or the face. Certain sequences of ideas charm us as much as others tire us. It is a real intellectual delight to get a problem solved, and a real intellectual torment to have to leave it unfinished. The first set of examples, the sounds, lines, and colours, are either bodily sensations, or the images of such. The second set seem to depend on processes in the ideational centres exclusively. Taken together, they appear to prove that there are pleasures and pains inherent in certain forms of nerve-action as such, wherever that action occur. The case of these feelings we will at present leave entirely aside, and confine our attention to the more complicated cases in which a wave of bodily disturbance of some kind accompanies the perception of the interesting sights or sounds, or the passage of the exciting train of ideas. Surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the like, become then the names of the mental states with which the person is possessed. The bodily disturbances are said to be the "manifestation" of these several emotions, their "expression" or "natural language;" and these emotions themselves, being so strongly characterized both from within and without, may be called the standard emotions. --William James
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment written by Alexander Broadie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-10 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment offers a philosophical perspective on an eighteenth-century movement that has been profoundly influential on western culture. A distinguished team of contributors examines the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, Colin Maclaurin and other Scottish thinkers, in fields including philosophy, natural theology, economics, anthropology, natural science and law. In addition, the contributors relate the Scottish Enlightenment to its historical context and assess its impact and legacy in Europe, America and beyond. The result is a comprehensive and accessible volume that illuminates the richness, the intellectual variety and the underlying unity of this important movement. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy, theology, literature and the history of ideas.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion written by Peter Goldie and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-12-03 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook presents thirty-one state-of-the-art contributions from the most notable writers on philosophy of emotion today. Anyone working on the nature of emotion, its history, or its relation to reason, self, value, or art, whether at the level of research or advanced study, will find the book an unrivalled resource and a fascinating read.
