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Title: The Invention of Autonomy : A History of Modern Moral Philosophy by Jerome B. Schneewind ISBN: 0-521-47938-X Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 13 December, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The philosophy of self-governance
Comment: Jerome Schneewind has tackled a big job in this massively erudite volume and done it remarkably well.
This book is a thorough history of modern moral philosophy, from roughly Thomas Aquinas to Immanuel Kant. What it traces is the development of the ideal of self-governance (the "autonomy" of the title).
And wow, is it good. It's well-written, it's scholarly without being inaccessible, and it treats the thought of every major ethical theorist (and some minor ones) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It's divided into four blocks. The first treats the subject of natural law, which was in philosophical fashion at the time our story opens. The second covers the "perfectionist" ethics that followed the movement away from natural law. The third treats philosophers who began to sever ethics from theology altogether and develop a "naturalized" morality. The fourth covers the last steps up to the philosophy of Kant, including his immediate forebears and the development of Kant's own concept of "autonomy".
The five-hundred-odd-page text never bogs down, either. Schneewind is a crisp and clear writer who keeps things both interesting and moving. (I especially like his half-chapter on Spinoza.)
This is somewhere between history of philosophy and philosophy of history. On the one hand, Schneewind is just reporting the historical development of ethical philosophy; on the other hand, he's also describing the philosophical arc from natural law to Kant in a way that sheds Kant's light backward onto two centuries' worth of his predecessors.
If you're interested in ethics and its history, you'll want to read this. It's hard to understand where we are and where we're going without knowing where we've been.
Rating: 5
Summary: Indubitably good
Comment: I would encourage anyone who is interested in modern morality, and moral philosophy specifically, to read this judicious and profound history. Many contemporary moral problems simply aren't understandable without understanding the historical context from which they arise. A principal virtue of this book is that it is the first text - to my knowledge - which deals with the history of modern moral philosphy using the texts of moral philosophers themselves, and thereby staying away from unphilosophical forms of historicism. Also, the text makes understandable some of the problems to which "autonomy" as a current moral value is intended to address, and so helps one understand why that value has become so important in contemporary culture discourse. Deceptively readably, the proundness of this book is a tesitmony to the importance of an intellectual movement its author help to establish - that ideas themselves are important to explaining human progress, but that they need to be placed within the intellectual context from which they come. Simply put, it is that rare book - difficult to find in the current academic world - that represents the achievement of a life time of thought and teaching about modern moral philosophy, by someone who is himself a philosopher, and who those of us that know him admire.
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Title: Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant by J. B. Schneewind ISBN: 0521003040 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 09 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.00 |
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Title: Lectures on Ethics by Immanuel Kant, Peter Heath, J. B. Schneewind ISBN: 0521788048 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 19 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Creating the Kingdom of Ends by Christine M. Korsgaard ISBN: 0521499623 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 28 July, 1996 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant by Susan Neiman ISBN: 0195113888 Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr on Demand Pub. Date: November, 1997 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Marx-Engels Reader by Karl Marx, New York :, Friedrich Selections. English. 1978 Engels, Robert C. Tucker ISBN: 039309040X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 1978 List Price(USD): $26.30 |
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