Essays on Ethics and Culture

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Essays on Ethics and Culture
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Contents
Introduction
Essay 1: Wittgenstein and Moral Realism: The Debate Continues
	1 Introduction: Recalling the 1980s
	2 Questions of Method
	3 The Idea of Truth-Aptitude
	4 Intellectual Authority-Relations
	5 Degrees of Factuality
	6 Recognition-Transcendent Moral Truth?
	7 The Power to Imagine Alternatives
	8 Values and Secondary Qualities
	9 An Enduring Critical Realism
Essay 2: Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and the ‘Apocalyptic View’
	1 Introduction
	2 Tolstoy as an Influence on Wittgenstein
	3 Tolstoy’s Confession
	4 The ‘Truly Apocalyptic View’
	5 ‘Spirits Will Hover Over the Ashes’
	6 Alienation Effects
	7 Order and Breakdown
Essay 3: ‘The Sickness of a Time’: Social Pathology and Therapeutic Philosophy
Essay 4: Second Nature, Habitus, and the Ethical: Remarks on Wittgenstein and Bourdieu
	1 Introduction: From Aristotle to Wittgenstein
	2 The Contribution of Bourdieu
	3 Practice and Understanding
	4 The Critical Project
	5 Determinism and Social Pessimism
	6 Surface and Depth: The Hazards of ‘Constructive’ Philosophy
	7 A Route Back to Optimism
Essay 5: Practical Reason and Character-Formation
Essay 6: Between Tradition and Criticism: The ‘Uncodifiability’ of the Normative
	1 Our Epistemic Debt to ‘Second Nature’
	2 An Aristotelian Echo in Wittgenstein
	3 Practical Reason: A More Free-Wheeling Account
	4 Explicit Principles and Their Inbuilt Limits
	5 A Mode of Understanding that Exceeds the Propositional
	6 The Diversity of Rules and Codes
	7 Quietism versus Conservatism
Essay 7: The Unquiet Life: Salience and Moral Responsibility
	1 Too Much Information
	2 Salience and Practical Reason
	3 Involuntary Wrongs
	4 Ethical Data
	5 The Long Reach of Blame
	6 An Ideal Notion of Attentiveness
	7 The Surprise Attack on Conscience
	8 The Shifting Landscape of Salience
	9 Democratic Dialogue
	10 The Big Picture
Essay 8: The Varieties of Attention
Essay 9: The Elusiveness of the Ethical: From Murdoch to Diamond
	A. Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1980; first published 1960), 8–9
	B. Colette, Chéri (2001, trans. Roger Senhouse; first published 1920), 95
	C. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1987; first published 1904), 553
Essay 10: Post-Existentialist Moments: Murdoch and Highsmith
Essay 11: Iris Murdoch and the Quality of Consciousness
Essay 12: Vulnerable and Invulnerable: Two Faces of Dialectical Reasoning
Essay 13: Judith Butler on Political Agency
Essay 14: Philosophy, Literature, Politics: The Cases of Rorty and Collingwood
	1 The Future of Philosophy
	2 Intentionally Peripheral Thinkers
	3 Philosophical Writing: Rorty versus Collingwood
	4 Sources of Moral Commitment
	5 Normal and Abnormal Discourse
	6 Conformity or Conformism?
	7 The Role of Orientation
	8 The Human Universal
	9 Our Despotism or Theirs?
	10 The Hazard of Bad Faith
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index