On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self Understanding - Couverture rigide

Eldridge, Richard

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0226203166 ISBN 13 : 9780226203164

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 1989

Synopsis

<div>In this remarkable blend of sophisticated philosophical ysis 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. <br><br>Eldridge presents an extensive new interpretation of Kantian ethics that is deeply informed by Kant's aesthetics. He defends a reed version of Kantian universalism and a Kantian conception of the <i>content</i> of morality. Eldridge then turns to literature armed not with any <i>a priori </i>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. <br><br>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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 1989
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0226203166
• ISBN 13: 9780226203164
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 2
• Nombre de pages: 224
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible