What Are the Humanities For?最新文献

What Are the Humanities For? Pub Date : 2021-04-01 DOI: 10.1017/9781108974615.010

W. Drees

引用次数: 0

Understanding Others 理解他人

What Are the Humanities For? Pub Date : 2020-12-11 DOI: 10.1017/9781108974615.004

J. Curthoys, C. Cordner

{"title":"Understanding Others","authors":"J. Curthoys, C. Cordner","doi":"10.1017/9781108974615.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108974615.004","url":null,"abstract":"MORAL PHILOSOPHY IS often disappointing to those who, unaware of the nature of the subject, look there for insight into the human condition. One reason for this is that, ever since Aristotle rejected Socrates’ strange identification of knowledge and virtue, and insisted that the moral consists of doing rather than knowing (or, in the language of the profession, of practical rather than pure reason), astonishingly few philosophers have reconsidered the extent to which moral questions may be questions of understanding. But, without some such notion, morality will not have depth and nor, therefore, will the moral philosophy that purports to elucidate it. Christopher Cordner’s project of restoring to moral philosophy a notion of moral depth is so modestly presented that one could miss the enormity of what he is attempting and of what this book could help achieve. At the most general level, Cordner’s book profoundly shifts the focus of our moral thinking, both in moral philosophy and in everyday life. We are too immersed, he believes, in the Enlightenment notion that morality is about ‘improving things’, where the improvement is assumed to be in our external situation. The notion that we should ‘help people’ is also often based on the assumption that it is the results of our actions that matter. Insofar as these notions neglect the spirit in which such help or improvement may be undertaken (whether, say, it is done condescendingly or with compassion), they are relatively superficial. In their place — or rather, to provide them with their proper foundation — Cordner articulates what he claims are our deeper, but more covert, moral intuitions. According to these, it is appropriateness of response that is most fundamentally required of us. Since this obliges us to attend to the meaning of what we and others do, moral problems become primarily ones of adequate understanding and only secondarily of ‘doing the right thing’. The understanding involved, however, is not of the purely cognitive kind, and is accessible to all, whatever their educational level. (Cordner refers to our ‘senses’ of things.) So the philosophical task becomes that of clarifying the nature of this sensitive understanding, which is the core of our moral life. Here, Cordner is not without his influences, and he generously acknowledges his debt to Iris Murdoch and to his friend Raimond Gaita. From them he learned that this distinctively moral understanding is in the nature of a response to others and that, at bottom, it concerns ‘the individual as knowable by love’, as Murdoch put it. To their dissident programme in moral philosophy — dissident precisely because the central ethical notion is love rather than reason — Cordner’s distinctive contribution arises from the way he demonstrates the necessity of an adequate concept of ‘the other’ to understand the nature of morality. To put this in terms closer to his own, it lies in his account of ethical life as consisting fundamentally in our e","PeriodicalId":374318,"journal":{"name":"What Are the Humanities For?","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129082849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 26

Professionals 专业人员

What Are the Humanities For? Pub Date : 2020-05-20 DOI: 10.4135/9781473957701.n38

Elizabeth Hull

{"title":"Professionals","authors":"Elizabeth Hull","doi":"10.4135/9781473957701.n38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473957701.n38","url":null,"abstract":"Professions are institutionalised bodies of specialised knowledge and practice around which divisions of labour within contemporary societies are organised. As well as performing a collective function, membership within a profession offers individuals upward social mobility and meritocratic recognition. Professional expertise is so ubiquitous in societies around the world that we tend not to ask how and why specialised occupational groups have emerged, how they produce, control, and apply their knowledge, and how the meanings of professionalism differ from one context to the next. Anthropologists’ early focus on colonial settings attuned them to view professionals as instruments of political power and control, particularly in biomedical contexts. Subsequent studies have produced a diverse array of interpretations, seeing professionalism as a performative or aesthetic practice that sits apart from the messy realities of work, as a marker of prestige and class mobility, and as a site of ethical engagement and debate. Recent approaches tend to focus on the ways in which professional identity is made through everyday practice and the struggles entailed in maintaining it, rather than viewing it as a label conferred automatically on the basis of training. Finally, the study of professionals has prompted renewed attention to anthropologists’ own claims to professionalism, and the social networks, institutions, and epistemic assumptions needed to sustain it.","PeriodicalId":374318,"journal":{"name":"What Are the Humanities For?","volume":"43 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141203895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 95

Responsible Scholarship 负责任的奖学金

What Are the Humanities For? Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1017/9781108974615.006

Weishi Liu

引用次数: 0

The Humanities 人文学科

What Are the Humanities For? Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1017/9781108974615.003

引用次数: 4

Canine, Alien, and Human Humanities 犬类、外星人和人类人文学科

What Are the Humanities For? Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1017/9781108974615.001

引用次数: 0

Index 指数

What Are the Humanities For? Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1017/9781108974615.012

引用次数: 0

Self-involving Self-involving

What Are the Humanities For? Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1017/9781108974615.005

引用次数: 0

Selected Literature 选择文学

What Are the Humanities For? Pub Date : 1900-01-01 DOI: 10.1017/9781108974615.011

P. Parízek

引用次数: 5