Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis (Swansea Studies in Philosophy)

✍ Scribed by Craig Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 165
• Edition: First Edition
• 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

Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Introduction......Page 11
1. Sympathy......Page 17
2. Rational Altruism......Page 32
3. Character......Page 51
4. Moral Incapacity......Page 69
5. An Attitude Towards a Soul......Page 86
6. Sympathy and Other Primitive Responses......Page 106
7. Sympathy and Understanding......Page 123
Appendix. A Utilitarian Theory?......Page 145
Notes......Page 148
Bibliography......Page 159
Index......Page 163