Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis

✍ Scribed by Craig Taylor (auth.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 165
• Series: Swansea Studies in Philosophy
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

It is widely held in contemporary moral philosophy that moral agency must be explained in terms of some more basic account of human nature. This book presents a fundamental challenge to this view. Specifically, it argues that sympathy, understood as an immediate and unthinking response to another's suffering, plays a constitutive role in our conception of what it is to be human, and specifically in that conception of human life on which anything we might call a moral life depends.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-ix
Introduction....Pages 1-6
Sympathy....Pages 7-21
Rational Altruism....Pages 22-40
Character....Pages 41-58
Moral Incapacity....Pages 59-75
An Attitude Towards a Soul....Pages 76-95
Sympathy and Other Primitive Responses....Pages 96-112
Sympathy and Understanding....Pages 113-134
Back Matter....Pages 135-155

✦ Subjects

Ethics;Moral Philosophy;Analytic Philosophy;Religious Studies, general