Moral Wisdom and Good LivesCornell University Press, 1995 - 237 páginas In this profound and yet accessible book, John Kekes discusses moral wisdom: a virtue essential to living a morally good and personally satisfying life. He advances a broad, nontechnical argument that considers the adversities inherent in the human condition and assists in the achievement of good lives. The possession of moral wisdom, Kekes asserts, is a matter of degree: more of it makes lives better, less makes them worse. Exactly what is moral wisdom, however, and how should it be sought? Ancient Greek and medieval Christian philosophers were centrally concerned with it. By contrast, modern Western sensibility doubts the existence of a moral order in reality; and because we doubt it, and have developed no alternatives, we have grown dubious about the traditional idea of wisdom. Kekes returns to the classical Greek sources of Western philosophy to argue for the contemporary significance of moral wisdom. He develops a proposal that is eudaimonistic--secular, anthropocentric, pluralistic, individualistic, and agonistic. He understands moral wisdom as focusing on the human effort to create many different forms of good lives. Although the approach is Aristotelian, the author concentrates on formulating and defending a contemporary moral ideal. The importance of this ideal, he shows, lies in increasing our ability to cope with life's adversities by improving our judgment. In chapters on moral imagination, self-knowledge, and moral depth, Kekes calls attention to aspects of our inner life that have been neglected because of our cultural inattention to moral wisdom. He discusses these inner processes through the tragedies of Sophocles, which can inspire us with their enduring moral significance and help us to understand the importance of moral wisdom to living a good life. |
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... evaluation , and judgment required for living according to it . The knowledge is of good and evil as they affect ourselves and of the con- ditions , permanent and changing , that form the context within which we must do what we can to ...
... evaluation , or be- cause for any one of a variety of reasons we are ignorant of the desires that prompt them . Such actions are caused by addictive cravings , brainwashing , posthypnotic suggestion , stupidity , self - deception ...
... evaluation , and the consequent identification with or rejection of a desire , is , if not derived from , then readily compatible with the later Socrates ' tripartite division of the soul . The desires we evaluate are in the lowest ...
Contenido
A Eudaimonistic Conception of Good Lives | 16 |
The Socratic Ideal and Its Problems | 31 |
Permanent Adversities | 51 |
Derechos de autor | |
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