Collected Maxims and Other Reflections

Collected Maxims and Other Reflections
Author: Fran^cois de La Rochefoucauld
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2008-05-08
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0199540004

This is the fullest collection of La Rochefoucauld's writings ever published in English, and includes the first complete translation of the Miscellaneous Reflections. A table of alternative maxim numbers and an index of topics help the reader to locate any maxim quickly.

Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography

Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography
Author: Helene E. Roberts
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1072
Release: 2013-09-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1136787933

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Grandstanding

Grandstanding
Author: Justin Tosi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190900164

We are all guilty of it. We call people terrible names in conversation or online. We vilify those with whom we disagree, and make bolder claims than we could defend. We want to be seen as taking the moral high ground not just to make a point, or move a debate forward, but to look a certain way--incensed, or compassionate, or committed to a cause. We exaggerate. In other words, we grandstand. Nowhere is this more evident than in public discourse today, and especially as it plays out across the internet. To philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, who have written extensively about moral grandstanding, such one-upmanship is not just annoying, but dangerous. As politics gets more and more polarized, people on both sides of the spectrum move further and further apart when they let grandstanding get in the way of engaging one another. The pollution of our most urgent conversations with self-interest damages the very causes they are meant to forward. Drawing from work in psychology, economics, and political science, and along with contemporary examples spanning the political spectrum, the authors dive deeply into why and how we grandstand. Using the analytic tools of psychology and moral philosophy, they explain what drives us to behave in this way, and what we stand to lose by taking it too far. Most importantly, they show how, by avoiding grandstanding, we can re-build a public square worth participating in.

Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life

Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life
Author: Laurence D. Cooper
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0271029889

The rise of modern science created a crisis for Western moral and political philosophy, which had theretofore relied either on Christian theology or Aristotelian natural teleology as guarantors of an objective standard for &"the good life.&" This book examines Rousseau's effort to show how and why, despite this challenge from science (which he himself intensified by equating our subhuman origins with our natural state), nature can remain a standard for human behavior. While recognizing an original goodness in human being in the state of nature, Rousseau knew this to be too low a standard and promoted the idea of &"the natural man living in the state of society,&" notably in Emile. Laurence Cooper shows how, for Rousseau, conscience&—understood as the &"love of order&"&—functions as the agent whereby simple savage sentiment is sublimated into a more refined &"civilized naturalness&" to which all people can aspire.

Christian Grace and Pagan Virtue

Christian Grace and Pagan Virtue
Author: J. Warren Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2011-01-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0195369939

Warren Smith examines the neglected biblical, liturgical and theological foundations of Ambrose's thought on ethics. Earlier studies have found little that was distinctively Christian in Ambrose's image of the virtuous person. Smith shows that, although like the pagans he emphasized moderation, courage, justice, and prudence, for Ambrose these characteristics were shaped by the church's beliefs about God's salvific economy.

Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue

Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue
Author: Ryan Patrick Hanley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2009-06-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139477390

Recent years have witnessed a renewed debate over the costs at which the benefits of free markets have been bought. This book revisits the moral and political philosophy of Adam Smith, capitalism's founding father, to recover his understanding of the morals of the market age. In so doing it illuminates a crucial albeit overlooked side of Smith's project: his diagnosis of the ethical ills of commercial societies and the remedy he advanced to cure them. Focusing on Smith's analysis of the psychological and social ills endemic to commercial society - anxiety and restlessness, inauthenticity and mediocrity, alienation and individualism - it argues that Smith sought to combat corruption by cultivating the virtues of prudence, magnanimity and beneficence. The result constitutes a new morality for modernity, at once a synthesis of commercial, classical and Christian virtues and a normative response to one of the most pressing political problems of Smith's day and ours.