Reason's Grief: An Essay on Tragedy and Value

✍ Scribed by George W. Harris

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 312
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In Reason's Grief, George Harris takes W. B. Yeats's comment that we begin to live only when we have conceived life as tragedy as a call for a tragic ethics, something the modern West has yet to produce. He argues that we must turn away from religious understandings of tragedy and the human condition and realize that our species will occupy a very brief period of history, at some point to disappear without a trace. We must accept an ethical perspective that avoids pernicious fantasies about ultimate redemption but that sees tragic loss as a permanent and pervasive aspect of our daily lives, yet finds a way to think, feel, and act with both passion and hope. Reason's Grief takes us back through the history of our thinking about value to find our way. The call is for nothing less than a paradigm shift for understanding both tragedy and ethics.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Half-title......Page 3
Title......Page 5
Copyright......Page 6
Dedication......Page 7
Contents......Page 9
Acknowledgments......Page 11
An Aesthetic Prelude......Page 13
1 The Problem of Tragedy......Page 30
2 The Dubious Ubiquity of Practical Reason......Page 54
3 Nihilism......Page 75
4 Pessimism......Page 98
5 Monism: An Epitaph......Page 122
Epicurus......Page 124
Bentham......Page 135
Mill......Page 149
Decision theory......Page 159
6 Moralism and the Inconstancy of Value......Page 163
7 Moralism and the Impurity of Value......Page 186
8 Best Life Pluralism and Reason's Regret......Page 211
9 Tragic Pluralism and Reason's Grief......Page 243
Liberty versus security......Page 255
Equality versus cultural excellence......Page 264
10 Postscript on the Future: The Idea of Progress and the Avoidance of Despair......Page 274
Bibliography......Page 301
Index......Page 309