Phenomenology Of Values And Valuing

Although a key aspect of the phenomenological movement is its contribution to value theory (axiology) and value perception (almost all the major figures devoted a great part of their labors to these topics), there has been relatively little attention paid to these themes. This volume in part makes up for this lacuna by being the first anthology on value-theory in the phenomenological movement. It indicates the scope of the issues by discussing, e.g., the distinctive acts of valuing, openness to value, the objectivity of values, the summation and combination of values, the deconstruction of values, the value of absence, and the value of nature. It also contains discussions of most of the major representative figures not only in their own right but also in relationship to one another: Von Ehrenfels, Brentano, Scheler, Hartmann, Husserl, Heidegger, Schutz, and Derrida.

This book provides a framework for phenomenological axiology. It offers a novel account of the existence and nature of values as they appear in conscious experience. By building on previous approaches, including those of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Nicolai Hartmann, the author develops a unique account of what values really are. After explicating and defending this account, he applies it to several of the most difficult questions in axiology: for example, how our experiences of value can differ from those of others without reducing values to subjective judgments or how the values we experience are connected to the volitional acts that they inspire. This provides satisfactory answers to certain fundamental questions concerning the basic structure of value-experiences. Accordingly, this book represents a novel step forward in phenomenological axiology. Towards a Phenomenology of Values will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology and value theory.

Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann developed ethics upon a phenomenological basis. This volume demonstrates that their contributions to a material ethics of value are complementary: by supplementing the work of one with that of the other, we obtain a comprehensive and defensible axiological and moral theory. By “phenomenology,” we refer to an intuitive procedure that attempts to describe thematically the insights into essences, or the meaning-elements of judgments, that underlie and make possible our conscious awareness of a world and the evaluative judgments we make of the objects and persons we encounter in the world.

This study of axiology explores the axiocentricity of being human. Human beings dwell in the realm of value. Values are not simply what persons have; values in large part are what persons are. The mystique of values is analyzed here in terms of their cultural, phenomenological, and ontological status. The relationship between science and values is debated. Values should not be submitted to reductionism. Postmodernism raises new problems for the future of a philosophy of values. Yet, we may direct our hopes toward happiness, universalism, and humanism as inseparable from value-life.

This book attempts to open up a path towards a phenomenological theory of values (more technically, a phenomenological axiology). By drawing on everyday experience, and dissociating the notion of value from that of tradition, it shows how emotional sensibility can be integrated to practical reason. This project was prompted by the persuasion that the fragility of democracy, and the current public irrelevance of the ideal principles which support it, largely depend on the inability of modern philosophy to overcome the well-entrenched skepticism about the power of practical reason. The book begins with a phenomenology of cynical consciousness, continues with a survey of still influential theories of value rooted in 20th century philosophy, and finally offers an outline of a bottom-up axiology that revives the anti-skeptical legacy of phenomenology, without ignoring the standards set by contemporary metaethics.

This Oxford Handbook offers a broad critical survey of the development of phenomenology, one of the main streams of philosophy since the 19th century. Comprising 37 specially written essays by leading figures in the field, it will be the authoritative guide to how phenomenology started, how it developed, and where it is heading.

This book expounds the basic principles of Axiology as a major field of philosophical inquiry. Those principles can be discovered and demonstrated by scientific method. In treating scientific inquiry the book throws light on what values are and how they are known. It explores questions of Good and Bad, Ends and Means, and Appearance and Reality as applied to values. Axiology, argues the author, provides the basis for ethics as the science of oughtness: the power that a greater good has over a lesser good in compelling our choices. The book concludes with a survey of efforts to establish Axiology as a science.

A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussions on the ethical principles of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and positivism.