The Concept of Nazi Ethics: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (004) ◽  
pp. 96-108
Author(s):  
Olga ZUBETS
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.


Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-329
Author(s):  
Sarah Cooper

Experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder is an intricate explorer of perception. Many of her exquisite silent short films feature flowers that are scrutinized frame by frame in shots that appear to have layers, as well as volume, and to quiver between simultaneity and succession. Yet these perceptual palimpsests that present almost too much for the eye to take in also reveal an as yet unexplored relation to imagination. Informed by ecological principles and foregrounding floral beauty, Lowder's Bouquets create a striking bond between perceptual and imaginative space. This article draws upon twentieth-century phenomenological accounts of perception before delving into earlier historical discussions of beauty in nature and in art, and bringing out connections to moral philosophy and feminist ecophilosophy, in order to understand how the beautiful entwines with ecological concern in the perceptual-imaginative space of her films.


2008 ◽  
Vol 2008 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Kersting

Within the Kantian ethics consciousness of the moral principle is a fact of reason which cannot be grounded in any antecedent data, empirical or rational. Hegel however argues that the fact of reason is necessarily embedded in the fact of „Sittlichkeit“, that a pure reason is an empty and chimerical construction, that moral knowledge is unavoidably rootet in the contingent moral convictions of the given cultural and social environment. This essay defends Hegel’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy and – by generalizing Hegel’s hermeneutic approach – sketches the outlines of an explicatory concept of ethics which contradicts the scientistic understanding of moral philosophy characteristic for Kant, the utilitarianism and the supporters of discourse ethics likewise.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Jens Bonnemann

In ethics, when discussing problems of justice and a just social existence one question arises obviously: What is the normal case of the relation between I and you we start from? In moral philosophy, each position includes basic socio-anthropological convictions in that we understand the other, for example, primarily as competitor in the fight for essential resources or as a partner in communication. Thus, it is not the human being as isolated individual, or as specimen of the human species or socialised member of a historical society what needs to be understood. Instead, the individual in its relation to the other or others has been studied in phenomenology and the philosophy of dialogue of the twentieth century. In the following essay I focus on Martin Buber’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of intersubjectivity which I use in order to explore the meaning of recognition and disrespect for an individual. They offer a valuable contribution to questions of practical philosophy and the socio-philosophical diagnosis of our time.


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