Three Traditions Of Moral Thought

The basis of this 1959 book was a course of lectures given at Cambridge University entitled Three Traditions of Moral Thought: Platonic-Christian; Utilitarian; Humanist. Designed for students of literature, and maintaining the accessible structure of the original lectures, it provides an introduction to English moral thought and the problems of moral philosophy.

Three Traditions of Greek Political Thought: Plato in Dialogue is an analysis of the emergence of Western philosophical and political thought in archaic and classical Greece. With particular focus on Plato, this book is an in-depth study of the contentious dialogue in classical political philosophy. In the late archaic and classical periods, two major traditions of philosophical and political thought developed. One tradition was associated with the Presocratic mechanistic materialistic philosophers and the Sophists. The second tradition, beginning with Pythagoras, gained full expression in the collected dialogues of Plato. Both of these philosophic traditions challenged the long established Greek mythico/religious tradition associated with Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and others. This study examines the dynamic dialogue involving these three traditions, which present competing and conflicting world views. It concludes that Plato's dialogues, taken together, quintessentially embody the mainstream dialogue or trialogue, as it could be called, in Greek political thought. This book also makes the case that the three major traditions of Greek political thought set the stage for the future dialogue of Western political philosophy even to this day.

Alasdair MacIntyre—whom Newsweek has called "one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world"—here presents his 1988 Gifford Lectures as an expansion of his earlier work Whose Justice? Which Rationality? He begins by considering the cultural and philosophical distance dividing Lord Gifford's late nineteenth-century world from our own. The outlook of that earlier world, MacIntyre claims, was definitively articulated in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which conceived of moral enquiry as both providing insight into and continuing the rational progress of mankind into ever greater enlightenment. MacIntyre compares that conception of moral enquiry to two rival conceptions also formulated in the late nineteenth century: that of Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and that expressed in the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII Aeterni Patris. The lectures focus on Aquinas's integration of Augustinian and Aristotelian modes of enquiry, the inability of the encyclopaedists' standpoint to withstand Thomistic or genealogical criticism, and the problems confronting the contemporary post-Nietzschean genealogist. MacIntyre concludes by considering the implications for education in universities and colleges.

Endorsements: "Mill on God is Professor Sell's latest impressive study in a long list of substantial theological writings, and historical and philosophical works on religion. Drawing upon several of Mill's classic philosophical texts, his posthumous publications on religion, and a range of informal communications, Sell has produced easily the best available introduction to Mill's religious thought, the intellectual context of his religious views, and the reception of his ideas and arguments. This combative and elegant work of historical and philosophical interpretation teases out the important ambiguities and tensions in Mill's thoughts, and amply demonstrates the centrality of his concern with religion." --James E. Crimmins, International Academic Advisor and Professor of Political Science, Huron University College, Canada Author Biography: Alan P. F. Sell, a philosopher-theologian and ecumenist, is employed in research, writing, and lecturing in the United Kingdom and abroad. He has held academic posts in England, Canada, and Wales, and ecclesiastical posts in England and Geneva. He is the author or editor of over thirty books, of which the most recent are Convinced, Concise and Christian: The Thought of Huw Parri Owen (Pickwick Publications, 2012) and Christ and Controversy: The Person of Christ in Nonconformist Thought and Ecclesial Experience (Pickwick Publications, 2012).

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How are we to understand past political thinkers? Is it a matter simply of reading their texts again and again? Do we have to relate past texts of political thought to the contexts in which ideas were composed and in which the aims of past thinkers were formulated? Or should past political theories be deconstructed so as to uncover not what their authors maintain, but what the texts reveal? In this book, theories of interpreting past political thinkers are examined and the interpretive methods of a range of theories are reviewed, including those of Hegel, Marx, Oakeshott, Collingwood, the Cambridge School, Foucault, Derrida and Gadamer. The application of these theories of interpretation to notable modern political theorists, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bentham, Mill, Nietzsche and Beauvoir is then used as a way of understanding modern political thought and of assessing interpretive theories of past political thought. The result is a book which sees the history of modern political thought as more than a procession of political theories but rather as a reflection on the meaning of past political thought and its interpretation. It provides a way of reading the history of modern political thought, in which the question of interpretation matters both for understanding how we interpret the past but also for considering what it means to undertake political thinking.

This book deals with the role and place of the general will in modern and contemporary political thought. This project is carried out at the crossroads of the history of ideas and political philosophy. It extensively develops historical and philosophical themes, showing modifications to the idea of the general will in the writings of thinkers who sometimes represent very distant epochs. The author tracks down the birth and the development of the idea of the general will in ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary times, devoting most of the book to the thoughts of Jean Jacques Rousseau and nineteenth and twentieth century British idealists.

Community, like love, is a concept everybody talks about but nobody bothers to define. From the community of scholars to the community of nations, we passionately seek and widely take for granted a quality of interrelatedness that touches a chord deep within each of us whose vibrations we spend little time submitting to critical examination. Frank Kirkpatrick's rigorous and detailed discussion of community places that notion within a discussion that has developed among philosophers over the past 200 years. Beginning with the contractual model of Hobbes and Locke, in which individuals work out rules to control their enforced proximity, he moves on to the more complex, organic model of Marx and Engles, and beyond that, the work of Whitehead, in which individuals now interact with one another as organically related parts of a greater whole. Finally, he devotes most of his attention to a third, highly personal model of community, which owes its most sophisticated recent formulation to John Macmurray. Within that model he sees the greatest possibilities for developing a coherent and comprehensive notion of community that takes seriously both the unique individuality of each person and the possibility for these individuals to commit themselves to loving fellowship with each other.