How are the numerous member states of the European Union today to reach proper consensus on an eventual common EU social model? In this meditative and reflective philosophical, literary and social inquiry, first presented as invited lectures at the Institute for European Studies of the Jagiellonian University, Peter McCormick highlights the still largely overlooked conceptual and linguistic resources of the distinctive European high modernist poetry of suffering for freshly rearticulating some of the most basic moral and ethical values at the historical roots of European civilization. Against contrasted readings of modernity in the works of both analytic and hermeneutic philosophers, successive studies investigate the figures of moral discourse, moral perception, and both moral motivation and ethical emancipation in the poetry of the Nobel Laureats, T.S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, and Eugenio Montale. The result is the renewed availability of richly resourceful formulations of fundamental European values for stimulating the ongoing work of achieving appropriate political consensus for a future harmonized European Union social policy.

Any EU constitution tomorrow will need to embody basic European ethical values. Yet the identity of such values and their sources remain strongly controversial. Peter McCormick retrieves from cultural origins of some major European values a basic ethical value of a measured and critically reasoned restraint in all things. At the same time he argues that this originary ethical value entails a renewed understanding of political, social, and individual sovereignties no longer as almost absolute but as necessarily limited. The rewards for polities of fully assuming such a basic ethical value turn out to include the ineluctable necessity for the rule of law, the constitutionalisation of social pluralisms, and the entrenchment of personal dignity.

This book offers a synoptic introduction to an important chapter of Polish 20th century philosophy, by introducing the studies of Kazimierz Twardowski, Tadeusz Czeżowski, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Roman Ingarden, Henryk Elzenberg, Maria Ossowska, and Józef Maria Bocheński and how they contributed to value theory, ethics and aesthetics. These philosophers differed in their more definite interests, methodological approaches, and main results and yet their investigations share a number of characteristic features. Questions of value, considered as extremely vital, are treated with care and precision. In spite of the richness of their insights and an impressive number of detailed results these philosophers refrain from hasty conclusions, trying here, as elsewhere, to conduct their studies in an intellectually and morally responsible way.

"Virtually incomparable. . . . [Arrowsmith] has quite literally distilled this poetry's essence in order to recompose it with all of its colors, scents, and exquisitely understated potency intact." -Rebecca West

This text contains contributions from two Kant conferences which took place in Leuven and Cerisy-la-Salle in 1993.