Experiments in Ethics - Brossura

Appiah, Kwame Anthony

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0674034570 ISBN 13: 9780674034570

Casa editrice: Harvard Univ Pr, 2010

Riassunto

In the past few decades, scientists of human nature—including experimental and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary theorists, and behavioral economists—have explored the way we arrive at moral judgments. They have called into question commonplaces about character and offered troubling explanations for various moral intuitions. Research like this may help explain what, in fact, we do and feel. But can it tell us what we ought to do or feel? In Experiments in Ethics, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics.

Some moral theorists hold that the realm of morality must be autonomous of the sciences; others maintain that science undermines the authority of moral reasons. Appiah elaborates a vision of naturalism that resists both temptations. He traces an intellectual genealogy of the burgeoning discipline of "experimental philosophy," provides a balanced, lucid account of the work being done in this controversial and increasingly influential field, and offers a fresh way of thinking about ethics in the classical tradition.

Appiah urges that the relation between empirical research and morality, now so often antagonistic, should be seen in terms of dialogue, not contest. And he shows how experimental philosophy, far from being something new, is actually as old as philosophy itself. Beyond illuminating debates about the connection between psychology and ethics, intuition and theory, his book helps us to rethink the very nature of the philosophical enterprise.

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Recensione:

This engaging book surveys influential recent attempts to bring empirical studies to bear specifically on moral philosophy, in a style that is accessible to non-specialists yet philosophically nuanced. Professor Appiah is sympathetic to the idea that moral philosophy has a good deal to learn from experimental work, but skeptical of the suggestion that this approach constitutes a radical departure from the philosophical tradition. He begins with a fascinating and erudite characterization of philosophy as a discipline that only "calved off" from psychology around the beginning of the twentieth century. Until then, experimental works and empirical investigation ("natural philosophy") were interwoven with metaphysical theorizing and deductive argumentation, and psychology was only just becoming a distinct academic discipline in its own right. Trying to distinguish metaphysical from psychological elements in the work of such canonical figures of European philosophy as Plato and Aristotle, Rene Descartes, John Locke, David Hume and J. S. Mill, Appiah claims, is like "trying to peel a raspberry." --Justin D'Arms "Times Literary Supplement" (03/06/2009)

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Su questa edizione

• Editore: Harvard Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0674034570
• ISBN 13: 9780674034570
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 274