This volume presents a series of lectures given by P. F. Strawson to final-year undergraduates at the University of Wales, Bangor, in the autumn term of 1946. Strawson was appointed to a lectureship at Bangor immediately after his military service in World War Two; he held this post for only one year before returning to Oxford, to a teaching position at University College. He eventually became one of the leading figures in twentieth-century philosophy. The lectures survive in manuscript fo...

Practical Thought: Essays on Reasons, Intuition, and Action presents a selection of Jonathan Dancy's most important philosophical essays since the late 1970s, focusing on the central themes of his work: metaethics, moral metaphysics, the theory of motivation, and the British Intuitionists. The twenty-four essays in this book chart his intellectual journey.

Everyone allows that we can reason to a new belief from beliefs that we already have. Aristotle thought that we could also reason from beliefs to action. Practical Shape: A Theory of Practical Reasoning establishes this possibility of reasoning to action, in a way that allows also for reasoning to intention, hope, fear, and doubt. While many philosophers have found little sense in Aristotle's claim, Dancy offers a general theory of reasoning that is sensitive to current debates bu...

There have been many books over the past decade, including outstanding collections of essays, on the topic of the ethical virtues and virtue-theoretic approaches in ethics. But the professional journals of philosophy have only recently seen a strong and growing interest in the intellectual virtues and in the development of virtue-theoretic approaches in epistemology. There have been four single-authored book length treatments of issues of virtue epistemology over the last seven years, begi...

This guide outlines concepts and principles of philosophy in an easy to understand format. Topics covered in this guide include: metaphysics, mind body problems, language games and much more.

Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel's words, "nowhere in particular". At the same time, each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world, a view that we can recognize as just one aspect of the whole. How do we reconcile these two standpoints--intellectua...

"MacIntyre--one of the foremost ethicists of the past half-century--makes a sustained argument for the cetnrality, in well-lived human lives, of both virtue and local communities of giving and receiving. He criticizes the mainstream of Western ethics, including his own previous position, for not taking seriously the dependent and animal sides of human nature, thereby overemphasizing the powers of reason and the pursuit of reason and the pursuit of autonomy. . . . This important work in eth...

If there is such a thing as reason, it has to be universal. Reason must reflect objective principles whose validity is independent of our point of view--principles that anyone with enough intelligence ought to be able to recognize as correct. But this generality of reason is what relativists and subjectivists deny in ever-increasing numbers. And such subjectivism is not just an inconsequential intellectual flourish or badge of theoretical chic. It is exploited to deflect argument and to be...

This study is about the principles for constructing polite speeches. The core of it first appeared in Questions and Politeness, edited by Esther N. Goody (now out of print). It is here reissued with a fresh introduction that surveys the considerable literature in linguistics, psychology and the social sciences that the original extended essay stimulated, and suggests distinct directions for research. The authors describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic constr...

Since the Enlightenment, a great deal of ethical philosophy has presumed that rational human beings must set aside their emotions when seeking to make objective and sound moral decisions. Love and Objectivity in Virtue Ethics challenges this presumption, arguing that emotions such as compassion and love are powerful aids in the complex process of attaining objective moral truths in decisions and actions.Drawing on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and the work of Ber...

Bestselling author Max van Manen’s Researching Lived Experience introduces a human science approach to research methodology in education and related fields. The book takes as its starting point the "everyday lived experience" of human beings in educational situations. Rather than rely on abstract generalizations and theories in the traditional sense, the author offers an alternative that taps the unique nature of each human situation. First published in 1990, this book is a classic of soci...

We can see a theft, hear a lie, and feel a stabbing. These are morally important perceptions. But are they also moral perceptions--distinctively moral responses? In this book, Robert Audi develops an original account of moral perceptions, shows how they figure in human experience, and argues that they provide moral knowledge. He offers a theory of perception as an informative representational relation to objects and events. He describes the experiential elements in perception, ill...