In this provocative new examination of the philosophical, moral and religious significance of literature, Michael Weston explores the role of literature in both analytic and continental traditions. He initiates a dialogue between them and investigates the growing importance of these issues for major contemporary thinkers. Each chapter explores a philosopher or literary figure who has written on the relation between literature and the good life, such as Derrida, Kierkegaard, Murdoch and Blanchot. Challenging and insightful, Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good is ideal for all students of philosophy and literature.

In this provocative new examination of the philosophical, moral and religious significance of literature, Michael Weston explores the role of literature in both analytic and continental traditions. He initiates a dialogue between them and investigates the growing importance of these issues for major contemporary thinkers. Each chapter explores a philosopher or literary figure who has written on the relation between literature and the good life, such as Derrida, Kierkegaard, Murdoch and Blanchot. Challenging and insightful, Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good is ideal for all students of philosophy and literature.

This book is an accessible text that explores what it means to be human. It is designed for an introductory course in Philosophy of the Human Being and contains an abundance of current examples, with embedded quotations from philosophers and selections from contemporary writers following the chapters. The author provides an introduction to philosophy, then discusses the topics of human sociability, intelligence, freedom, duality, individuality, and immortality. He concludes by highlighting the contrast between realism and materialism. This systematic approach focuses on issues, with a minimum of metaphysical superstructure and jargon, and provides connections between the readings. Book jacket.

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, deal with such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements.

In this remarkable blend of sophisticated philosophical analysis and close reading of literary texts, Richard Eldridge presents a convincing argument that literature is the most important and richest source of insights in favor of a historicized Kantian moral philosophy. He effectively demonstrates that only through the interpretation of narratives can we test our capacities as persons for acknowledging the moral laws as a formula of value and for acting according to it. Eldridge presents an extensive new interpretation of Kantian ethics that is deeply informed by Kant's aesthetics. He defends a revised version of Kantian universalism and a Kantian conception of the content of morality. Eldridge then turns to literature armed not with any a priori theory but with an interpretive stance inspired by Hegel's phenomenology of self-understanding, more or less naturalized, and by Wittgenstein's work on self-understanding as ongoing narrative-interpretive activity, a stance that yields Kantian results about the universal demands our nature places on itself. Eldridge goes on to present readings of novels by Conrad and Austen and poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge. In each text protagonists are seen to be struggling with moral conflicts and for self-understanding as moral persons. The route toward partial resolution of their conflicts is seen to involve multiple and ongoing activities of reading and interpreting. The result of this kind of interpretation is that such literature—literature that portrays protagonists as themselves readers and interpreters of human capacities for morality—is a primary source for the development of morally significant self-understanding. We see in the careers of these protagonists that there can be genuine and fruitful moral deliberation and valuable action, while also seeing how situated and partial any understanding and achievement of value must remain. On Moral Personhood at once delineates the moral nature of persons; shows various conditions of the ongoing, contextualized, partial acknowledgment of that nature and of the exercise of the capacities that define it; and enacts an important way of reading literature in relation to moral problems. Eldridge's work will be important reading for moral philosophers (especially those concerned with Kant, Hegel, and issues dividing moral particularists from moral universalists), literary theorists (especially those concerned with the value of literature and its relation to philosophy and to moral problems), and readers and critics of Conrad, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen.

Many debates about the moral status of things—for example, debates about the natural rights of human fetuses or nonhuman animals—eventually migrate towards a discussion of the capacities of the things in question—for example, their capacities to feel pain, think, or love. Yet the move towards capacities is often controversial: if a human’s capacities are the basis of its moral status, how could a human having lesser capacities than you and I have the same "serious" moral status as you and I? This book answers this question by arguing that if something is human, it has a set of typical human capacities; that if something has a set of typical human capacities, it has serious moral status; and thus all human beings have the same sort of serious moral status as you and I. Beginning from what our common intuitions tell us about situations involving "temporary incapacitation"—where a human organism has, then loses, then regains a certain capacity—this book argues for substantive conclusions regarding human fetuses and embryos, humans in a permanent vegetative state, humans suffering from brain diseases, and humans born with genetic disorders. Since these conclusions must have some impact on our ongoing moral and political debates about the proper treatment of such humans, this book will be useful to professionals and students in philosophy, bioethics, law, medicine, and public policy.

This book presents an original worldview, Homo risibilis, wherein self-referential humor is proposed as the path leading from a tragic view of life to a liberating embrace of human ridicule. Humor is presented as a conceptual tool for holding together contradictions and managing the unresolvable conflict of the human condition till Homo risibilis resolves the inherent tension without epistemological cost. This original approach to the human condition allows us to effectively address life’s ambiguities without losing sight of its tragic overtones and brings along far-ranging personal and social benefits. By defining the problem that other philosophies and many religions attempt to solve in terms we can all relate to, Homo risibilis enables an understanding of the Other that surpasses mere tolerance. Its egalitarian vision roots an ethic of compassion without requiring metaphysical or religious assumptions and liberates the individual for action on others’ behalf. It offers a new model of rationality which effectively handles and eventually resolves the tension between oneself, others, and the world at large. Amir’s view of the human condition transcends the field of philosophy of humor. An original worldview that fits the requirements of traditional philosophy, Homo risibilis is especially apt to answer contemporary concerns. It embodies the minimal consensus we need in order to live together and the active role philosophy should responsibly play in a global world. Here developed for the first time in a complete way, the Homo risibilis worldview is not only liberating in nature, but also illuminates the shortcomings of other philosophies in their attempts to secure harmony in a disharmonious world for a disharmonious human being.