Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning - Softcover

Blackburn, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199241392 ISBN 13: 9780199241392

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 2001

Synopsis

Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling and original philosophy of human motivation and morality. 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 to such questions in an exploration of the nature of moral emotions and the structures of human motivation. He develops a naturalistic ethics, which integrates our understanding of ethics with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. His theory does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical, and it banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions reveals 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

About the Author:

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Previously he was the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Adjunct Professor at the Australian National University's Research School of Social Sciences. From 1969 to 1990 he was Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford.

Review:

"Blackburn's stimulating...book makes a lively contribution. People interested in the issues it addresses will read it with profit."--Times Literary Supplement

"Ruling Passions gives us our humanity, providing some answers to those sceptics who find Kantian morality devoid of psychological realism."--Times Higher Educational Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0199241392
• ISBN 13: 9780199241392
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344