Eco-Republic

What the Ancients Can Teach Us about Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living

Melissa Lane (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

256 Seiten

2013
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-0-691-16220-1 (ISBN)

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An ecologically sustainable society cannot be achieved without citizens who possess the virtues and values that will foster it, and who believe that individual actions can indeed make a difference. Eco-Republic draws on ancient Greek thought--and Plato's Republic in particular--to put forward a new vision of citizenship that can make such a society a reality. Melissa Lane develops a model of a society whose health and sustainability depend on all its citizens recognizing a shared standard of value and shaping their personal goals and habits accordingly. Bringing together the moral and political ideas of the ancients with the latest social and psychological theory, Lane illuminates the individual's vital role in social change, and articulates new ways of understanding what is harmful and what is valuable, what is a benefit and what is a cost, and what the relationship between public and private well-being ought to be. Eco-Republic reveals why we must rethink our political imagination if we are to meet the challenges of climate change and other urgent environmental concerns.
Offering a unique reflection on the ethics and politics of sustainability, the book goes beyond standard approaches to virtue ethics in philosophy and current debates about happiness in economics and psychology. Eco-Republic explains why health is a better standard than happiness for capturing the important links between individual action and social good, and diagnoses the reasons why the ancient concept of virtue has been sorely neglected yet is more relevant today than ever.

Melissa Lane is professor of politics at Princeton University. She is the author of Method and Politics in Plato's "Statesman" and Plato's Progeny: How Plato and Socrates Still Captivate the Modern Mind.

Acknowledgements vii Part I INERTIA 1 Prologue to Chapter 1: Plato's Cave 3 Chapter 1: Introduction: Inertia as Failure of the Political Imagination 7 An Unconsciously Platonic Prologue to Chapter 2: Carbon Detox 27 Chapter 2:From Greed to Glory: Ancient to Modern Ethics - and Back Again? 29 Prologue to Chapter 3: Plato's Ring of Gyges 47 Chapter 3: Underpinning Inertia: The Idea of Negligibility 51 Part II IMAGINATION 77 Prologue to Chapter 4: Post-Platonic Perspectives on the Republic 79 Chapter 4: Meet Plato's Republic 83 Prologue to Chapter 5: Plato on Why Virtue Matters 99 Chapter 5: The City and the Soul 101 Prologue to Chapter 6: Plato's Idea of the Good 127 Chapter 6: The Idea of the Good 133 Part III INITIATIVE 157 Prologue to Chapter 7: Revisiting Plato's Cave 159 Chapter 7: Initiative and Individuals: A (Partly) Platonic Political Project 163 Notes 187 Works Cited 219 Index 235

Erscheint lt. Verlag	24.11.2013
Verlagsort	New Jersey
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 235 mm
Gewicht	397 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie Altertum / Antike
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Ökologie / Naturschutz
ISBN-10	0-691-16220-4 / 0691162204
ISBN-13	978-0-691-16220-1 / 9780691162201
Zustand	Neuware