Shame and Necessity: 57 - Rilegato

Williams, Bernard

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0520080467 ISBN 13: 9780520080461

Casa editrice: Univ of California Pr, 1993

Riassunto

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery.

The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours.

Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves.Shame and Necessity gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Bernard Williams (1929-2003) was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, and Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous books includeDescartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (1979), Moral Luck (1981), andEthics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985).

Product Description:

Book by Williams Bernard

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Univ of California Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0520080467
• ISBN 13: 9780520080461
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 254