Essays on the Foundations of Ethics

By C. I. Lewis
Edited by John Lange

Subjects: American Philosophy, Philosophy, Ethics
Paperback : 9781438464923, 266 pages, January 2018
Hardcover : 9781438464930, 266 pages, August 2017

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Editor’s Preface
Editor’s Introduction
Preface—and Confession

Essay 1. Introduction: About Philosophy in General and Ethics in Particular

Essay 2. The Good and Bad in Experience: Prolegomena

Essay 3. The Good and Bad in Experience

Essay 4. Semantics of the Imperative

Essay 5. Ethics and the Logical

Essay 6. Deliberate Acts

Essay 7. Right Acts and Good Acts

Essay 8. Right Doing and the Right to Do

Essay 9. We Approach the Normative Finalities

Appendix

Presentation of C. I. Lewis's final book, formulating a cognitivistic ethics.

Description

2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

C. I. Lewis, one of America's greatest philosophers, was tremendously influential in the fields of logic and epistemology. However, it was to ethics that he devoted the last years of his life. His approach to ethics was not merely as an academic pursuit, but as the deepest and most fundamental challenge of human life, older than philosophy itself: how should one respond to the necessity of action, and cope with the imposed, unforgiving imperatives of self-governance? Drawing from volumes of Lewis's hand-inscribed notes and drafts, John Lange has assembled a version of Lewis's final book, Essays on the Foundations of Ethics, bringing to light his desire to locate and articulate those moral realities which he found to be part of an enlightened common sense, a common sense to be expected in an evolved, self-governing, rational human nature.

John Lange is Professor of Philosophy at Queens College, City University of New York, and the author of several books, including Philosophy and the Challenge of the Future and The Cognitivity Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Claims of Philosophy.

Reviews

"This volume will be invaluable for those interested in value theory and ethics … Essential. " — CHOICE