Fichte's Ethics

Michelle Kosch (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

208 Seiten

2018
Oxford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-19-880966-1 (ISBN)

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Michelle Kosch offers a systematic, historically informed reconstruction of the ethical theory of the great German Idealist J. G. Fichte (1762-1814). Central to Fichte's theory are his accounts of rational agency and autonomy. Kosch highlights the theory's very substantial potential for contribution to ethics today.

One of Fichte's most important ideas - that nature can place limits on our ability to govern ourselves, and that anyone who values autonomy is thereby committed to the value of basic research and of the development of autonomy-enhancing technologies - has received little attention in the interpretative literature on Fichte, and has little currency in contemporary ethics. This volume aims to address both deficits. Beginning from a reconstruction of Fichte's theory of rational agency, Kosch examines his arguments for the thesis that rational agency must have two constitutive ends: substantive and formal independence. It argues for a novel interpretation of Fichte's conception of substantive independence, and shows how Fichte's account of moral duties is derived from the end of substantive independence on that conception. It also argues for a new interpretation of Fichte's conception of formal independence, and explains why the usual understanding of this end as providing direct guidance for action must be mistaken. It encompasses a systematic reconstruction of Fichte's first-order claims in normative ethics and political philosophy.

Michelle Kosch received a BA from Harvard College in 1990 and a PhD from Columbia University in 1999. She was employed as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen, and thereafter as an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of Michigan, before moving to Cornell in 2006.

1: Introduction
2: Rational Agency
3: Material independence
4: Formal independence
5: Independence as constitutive end
6: Conclusion

Erscheinungsdatum	17.04.2018
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	164 x 241 mm
Gewicht	472 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Geschichte der Philosophie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
ISBN-10	0-19-880966-2 / 0198809662
ISBN-13	978-0-19-880966-1 / 9780198809661
Zustand	Neuware