Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning - Hardcover

Blackburn, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198247850 ISBN 13: 9780198247852

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1998

Synopsis

Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling original philosophy of human motivation and morality. He maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. So these are the sorts of questions he addresses: Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame, disgust, and other moral emotions; he draws also on game theory and cognitive science in his account of the structures of human motivation.

Many philosophers have wanted a naturalistic ethics―a theory that integrates our understanding of human morality with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. What is special about Blackburn's naturalistic ethics is that it does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical. At the same time he banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions sets ethics in the context of human nature: it offers a solution to the puzzle of how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control.

About this title

Review

Executed with Blackburn's characteristic witty eloquence, with stylish literary references and many examples (Mind)

This book is that rare thing: a work of philosophy beautifully written, able to engage the interest of those outside a narrow sphere of academic specialists, while attending to philosophical problems that most worry those who spend their professional life trying to solve them (Ethics)

Ruling Passions gives us our humanity, providing some answers to those sceptics who find Kantian morality devoid of psychological realism (Alex Klaushoefer, Times Higher Education Supplement)

A fascinating book that seeks to clarify what we are doing when we make moral judgments (Philosophy)

About the Author

Simon Blackburn was previously the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He also holds an adjunct Chair at the Australian National University's Research School of Social Sciences. From 1969 to 1990 he was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford, and from 1984 to 1990 he edited the journal Mind. He is the author of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0198247850
• ISBN 13: 9780198247852
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 344