By Alastair Minnis (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) Can an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to segregate individual failing from official function? Chaucer addressed these perennial issues through two problematic … Continued
By Daniel Conway (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) Nietzsche is one of the most important and widely read philosophers of all time and his On the Genealogy of Morals is one of the most frequently studied of all his works-a key text in the study of moral philosophy. In Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals": A Reader's Guide, Daniel Conway explains … Continued
Edited by Tom Regan (NHC Fellow, 1984–85)
By Randolph Clarke (NHC Fellow, 2012–13) Philosophical theories of agency have focused primarily on actions and activities. But, besides acting, we often omit to do or refrain from doing certain things. How is this aspect of our agency to be conceived? This book offers a comprehensive account of omitting and refraining, addressing issues ranging from … Continued
By Bernard Gert (NHC Fellow, 2001–02) Thomas Hobbes was the first great English political philosopher. His work excited intense controversy among his contemporaries and continues to do so in our own time. In this masterly introduction to his work, Bernard Gert provides the first account of Hobbes’s political and moral philosophy that makes it clear why he is regarded … Continued
By W. D. Falk (NHC Fellow, 1979–80)
By Owen Flanagan (NHC Fellow, 2015–16) The world today is full of anger. Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel. At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth … Continued
By P. S. Greenspan (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) P.S. Greenspan uses the treatment of moral dilemmas as the basis for an alternative view of the structure of ethics and its relation to human psychology. Greenspan argues that dilemmas may be regarded as possible consequences of a set of social rules designed to be simple enough to … Continued
By Norman Fiering (NHC Fellow, 1978–79) The problems of moral philosophy were a central preoccupation of literate people in eighteenth-century America and Britain. It is not surprising, then, that Jonathan Edwards was drawn into a colloquy with some of the major ethicists of the age. Moral philosophy in this era was so all-encompassing in its … Continued
By Edmund L. Pincoffs (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) Attuned to the revival of moral concern in public and private life, Edmund Pincoffs argues in Quandaries and Virtues that the "structures known as ethical theories are more threats to moral sanity and balance than instruments for their attainment because ethical theories are, by nature, reductive." Pincoffs's is … Continued