Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism - Hardcover

Olafson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801804973 ISBN 13: 9780801804977

Publisher: John Hopkins University Press, 1967

Synopsis

Originally published in 1967. Many critics have claimed that existentialism has not produced any ethics, as distinct from the moralistic assertions of its individual proponents. Challenging this view, Professor Olafson demonstrates that Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty indeed worked out a powerful ethical theory and that their positions must be understood as deriving from a voluntarist concept of moral autonomy that can be traced beyond Nietzsche and Kant to certain tendencies in late-medieval thought. He demonstrates that a broad parallelism exists between developments in ethical theory among Continental philosophers of the phenomenological persuasion and the more analytically inclined philosophers of the English-speaking world.

About this title

About the Author

Frederick A. Olafson was a professor of education and philosophy in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1967
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801804973
• ISBN 13: 9780801804977
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 278