Reason and Responsibility

Reason and Responsibility
Author: Joel Feinberg
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company
Total Pages: 706
Release: 2005
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780534625573

The Twelfth Edition of this best-selling, topically organized anthology provides a superb balance of historical selections and recent material. This new edition features more readings than ever before--79 total--all, where necessary, in the finest translations available. The readings complement each other and naturally build on the topic being covered. Clear, concise introductions to each Part provide just enough guidance to let students learn from experiencing the readings themselves. The text's long-heralded selection of readings covers topics such as reason and religious belief, human knowledge, mind and its place in nature, determinism, free will and responsibility, and morality and its critics in five parts with careful attention to opposing points of view.

The Problems of Philosophy

The Problems of Philosophy
Author: Bertrand Russell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2001
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192854232

This classic work, first published in 1912, has never been supplanted as an approachable introduction to the theory of philosophical enquiry. It gives Russell's views on such subjects as the distinction between appearance and reality, the existence and nature of matter, idealism, knowledge by acquaintance and by description, induction, truth and falsehood, the distinction between knowledge, error and probable opinion, and the limits and value of philosophical knowledge.

Freedom and Responsibility

Freedom and Responsibility
Author: Hilary Bok
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2022-03-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400822734

Can we reconcile the idea that we are free and responsible agents with the idea that what we do is determined according to natural laws? For centuries, philosophers have tried in different ways to show that we can. Hilary Bok takes a fresh approach here, as she seeks to show that the two ideas are compatible by drawing on the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning. Bok argues that when we engage in practical reasoning--the kind that involves asking "what should I do?" and sifting through alternatives to find the most justifiable course of action--we have reason to hold ourselves responsible for what we do. But when we engage in theoretical reasoning--searching for causal explanations of events--we have no reason to apply concepts like freedom and responsibility. Bok contends that libertarians' arguments against "compatibilist" justifications of moral responsibility fail because they describe human actions only from the standpoint of theoretical reasoning. To establish this claim, she examines which conceptions of freedom of the will and moral responsibility are relevant to practical reasoning and shows that these conceptions are not vulnerable to many objections that libertarians have directed against compatibilists. Bok concludes that the truth or falsity of the claim that we are free and responsible agents in the sense those conceptions spell out is ultimately independent of deterministic accounts of the causes of human actions. Clearly written and powerfully argued, Freedom and Responsibility is a major addition to current debate about some of philosophy's oldest and deepest questions.

The Responsibility of Reason

The Responsibility of Reason
Author: Ralph Hancock
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2011-01-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1442207396

In The Responsibility of Reason, Ralph C. Hancock undertakes no less than to answer the Heideggerian challenge. Offering trenchant and original interpretations of Aristotle, Heidegger, Strauss, and Alexis de Tocqueville, he argues that Tocqueville saw the essential more clearly than apparently deeper philosophers. Hancock addresses political theorists on the question of the grounding of liberalism, and, at the same time, philosophers on the most basic questions of the meaning and limits of reason. Moreover, he shows how these questions are for us inseparable.

Hegel's Theory of Responsibility

Hegel's Theory of Responsibility
Author: Mark Alznauer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2015-02-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107078121

The first book-length treatment of a central concept in Hegel's practical philosophy - the theory of responsibility. This theory is both original and radical in its emphasis on the role and importance of social and historical conditions as a context for our actions.

Omissions

Omissions
Author: Randolph Clarke
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2014
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199347522

Besides acting, we often omit to do or refrain from doing certain things. Omitting and refraining are not simply special cases of action; they require their own distinctive treatment. This book offers the first comprehensive account of these phenomena, addressing questions of metaphysics, agency, and moral responsibility.

Responsibility from the Margins

Responsibility from the Margins
Author: David Shoemaker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2015
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198715676

David Shoemaker develops a novel pluralistic theory of responsibility, motivated by our ambivalence to cases of marginal agency--such as those caused by clinical depression or autism, for instance. He identifies three distinct types of responsibility, each with its own set of required capacities: attributability, answerability, and accountability.

The Origins of Responsibility

The Origins of Responsibility
Author: François Raffoul
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2010-04-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0253221730

François Raffoul approaches the concept of responsibility in a manner that is distinct from its traditional interpretation as accountability of the willful subject. Exploring responsibility in the works of Nietzsche, Sartre, Levinas, Heidegger, and Derrida, Raffoul identifies decisive moments in the development of the concept, retrieves its origins, and explores new reflections on it. For Raffoul, responsibility is less about a sovereign subject establishing a sphere of power and control than about exposure to an event that does not come from us and yet calls to us. These original and thoughtful investigations of the post-metaphysical senses of responsibility chart new directions for ethics in the continental tradition.

Personal Responsibility

Personal Responsibility
Author: Alexander Brown
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2009-11-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1847063993

Individual responsibility is an issue at the heart of public debates surrounding justice today - this book explores the philosophical implications of this hugely topical contemporary debate.

Reasons and Persons

Reasons and Persons
Author: Derek Parfit
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 880
Release: 1986-01-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191622443

This book challenges, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity. The author claims that we have a false view of our own nature; that it is often rational to act against our own best interests; that most of us have moral views that are directly self-defeating; and that, when we consider future generations the conclusions will often be disturbing. He concludes that moral non-religious moral philosophy is a young subject, with a promising but unpredictable future.