Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning

Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling and original philosophy of human motivation and morality. Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers to such questions in an exploration of the
nature of moral emotions and the structures of human motivation. He develops a naturalistic ethics, which integrates our understanding of ethics with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. His theory does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical, and it banishes the
spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions reveals how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control.


Author: Simon Blackburn
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 01/01/2001
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.72d
ISBN: 9780199241392

About the Author

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Previously he was the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Adjunct Professor at the Australian National University's Research School of Social Sciences. From 1969 to 1990 he was Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford.

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