The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought': 1640–1740 - Softcover

Darwall, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521457823 ISBN 13: 9780521457828

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1995

Synopsis

This book is a major work in the history of ethics, and provides the first study of early modern British philosophy in several decades. Professor Darwall discerns two distinct traditions feeding into the moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, there is the empirical, naturalist tradition, comprising Hobbes, Locke, Cumberland, Hutcheson, and Hume, which argues that obligation is the practical force that empirical discoveries acquire in the process of deliberation. On the other hand, there is the group including Cudworth, Shaftesbury, Butler, and in some moments Locke, which views obligation as inconceivable without autonomy and which seeks to develop a theory of the will as self-determining.

About this title

Book Description:

A major work in the history of ethics provides the first study of early modern British philosophy in several decades, discerning two distinct traditions feeding into the moral philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, based upon their respective definitions of "obligation."

From the Back Cover:

This major work in the history of ethics provides the first study of early modern British ethics in several decades. It aims to uncover the roots of the idea (called internalism in contemporary discussion) that any binding 'ought' must be based in the motives of a deliberating agent, as this notion developed in the thought of British philosophers writing in the period from Hobbes to the appearance of Hume's Treatise in 1740.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0521457823
• ISBN 13: 9780521457828
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 372