Korsgaard, Christine. On Having a Good
2014, Philosophy 89(3): 405-29.
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Added by: Graham Bex-PriestleyAbstract: In some recent papers I have been arguing that the concept ‘good-for’ is prior to the concept of ‘good’ (in the sense in which final ends are good), and exploring the implications of that claim. One of those implications is that everything that is good is good for someone. That implication seems to fall afoul of our intuitions about certain cases, such as the intuition that a world full of happy people and animals is better than a world full of miserable ones, even if the people and animals are different in the two cases, so that there is no one for whom the second world is better. Such cases tempt people to think that there must be impersonal goods, and that what it means to say that something is good for you is that you are the one who ‘has’ some impersonal good. In this paper, I argue that if we approach things in this way, it is impossible to say what the ‘having’ consists of, what relation it names. This leads me to a discussion of various things we do mean by saying that something is good for someone, how they are related to each other, and what sorts of entities can ‘have a good.’ Finally, I explain why we think that a world full of happy people and animals is better than a world full of miserable ones, even if the people and animals are different in the two cases.Comment: This is a fairly accessible piece arguing that the concept of 'good-for' is prior to 'good', such that nothing is good unless it is good for someone. It is useful for discussions about the sources of value.
Korsgaard, Christine. The Sources of Normativity
1996, Cambridge University Press.
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Added by: Chris Howard, Contributed by: Nomy ArpalyPublisher's Note: Ethical concepts are, or purport to be, normative. They make claims on us: they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least when we invoke them, we make claims on one another; but where does their authority over us - or ours over one another - come from? Christine Korsgaard identifies four accounts of the source of normativity that have been advocated by modern moral philosophers: voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and the appeal to autonomy. She traces their history, showing how each developed in response to the prior one and comparing their early versions with those on the contemporary philosophical scene. Kant's theory that normativity springs from our own autonomy emerges as a synthesis of the other three, and Korsgaard concludes with her own version of the Kantian account. Her discussion is followed by commentary from G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and a reply by Korsgaard.Comment: Parts of this book are "must-read" in any metaethics course. Chapter 1 (skipping sections 1.3.1-1.3.4) is an excellent addition to a unit on the authority of morality; chapters 2 and 3 are equally excellent additions to a unit on (Kantian) metaethical constructivism.
Korsgaard, Christine M.. Creating the Kingdom of Ends
1996, Cambridge University Press
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Jojanneke VanderveenPublisher's Note: Christine Korsgaard has become one of the leading interpreters of Kant's moral philosophy. She is identified with a small group of philosophers who are intent on producing a version of Kant's moral philosophy that is at once sensitive to its historical roots while revealing its particular relevance to contemporary problems. She rejects the traditional picture of Kant's ethics as a cold vision of the moral life which emphasises duty at the expense of love and value. Rather, Kant's work is seen as providing a resource for addressing not only the metaphysics of morals, but also for tackling practical questions about personal relations, politics, and everyday human interaction. This collection contains some of the finest current work on Kant's ethics and will command the attention of all those involved in teaching and studying moral theory.Comment: Very important contemporary defense of Kantian ethics. In an ethics/deontology class, Korsgaard should not be missed.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy
1999, Cornell University Press.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirPublisher's Note: Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists.In Making Sense of Taste, Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving of greater philosophical respect and attention. Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences. Turning to taste's objects?food and drink?she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Taste as Sense and as Sensibility
1997, Philosophical Topics 25 (1):201-230.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirIntroduction: Philosophers occasionally take note of the degree to which their theories make use of metaphoric language. Plato may have been the first to call attention to the heuristic use of sensory images to illuminate the world of abstractions, but twentieth-century thinkers have been particulalry reflective on the subject. Metaphors, remarks Iris Murdoch, are "fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision." Philosophical systems, she believes, can often be understood as explorations of centrally important images. Indeed, it seems to her "impossible to discuss certain kinds of concepts without resort to metaphor, since the concepts are themselves deeply metaphorical, and cannot be analyzed into non-metaphorical components without a loss of substance." Mark Johnson agrees and obeserves that recent discoveries in cognitive science provide empirical evidence for claims about metaphor that previously were largely intuitive, namely, that "metaphor is not merely a linguistic phenomenon, but more fundamentallly, a conceptual and experiential process that structures our world.
Kuki Shūzō. The Structure of Iki
2004, In Hiroshi Nara (ed.). The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Sh?z?. Univeristy of Hawai'i Press.
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Added by: Meilin ChinnSummary: One of the most important and creative works in modern Japanese aesthetics. Kuki develops a description of a uniquely Japanese sense of taste (iki) that brings together characteristics of the geisha, samurai, and Buddhist priest.Comment: Best used by a reader with at least an introductory knowledge of Japanese aesthetics. Could be used comparatively with work on disinterest in western Aesthetics, e.g., Kant.
Kukla, Rebecca. Myth, Memory and Misrecognition in Sellars’ ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’
2000, Philosophical Studies (101) 2-3 161-211.
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Added by: Andrea Blomqvist, Contributed by: Rory WilsonIntroduction: In increasing numbers, philosophers are coming to read Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1997, hereafter EPM) as having dealt the definitive death blow to the idea that inner states with epistemic authority could have this authority immediately. EPM purportedly proves that instead, such states necessarily show up already embedded within a web of inferentially articulated conceptual knowledge, and that in order for this to be possible, the epistemic subject must be a negotiator of a normative space in which standards of justification and correctness are already recognized. [...] In this paper I will attempt to show that Sellars' mythical explanations in EPM employ a very specific and rhetorically complex methodology, and likewise that we will not be in a position to critically assess the paper's arguments unless we give careful attention to its overall textual structure and to the nature of the mythical explanations it employs.Comment: A companion to Sellars' ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ for students more inclined to social philosophy.
Laozi, trans. D.C. Lau. Tao Te Ching (Laozi/ Daodejing); trans. DC Lau
1963, Columbia University Press
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, Contributed by: I Xuan ChongPublisher’s Note:
The Laozi is a key text in Daoism/Taosim (a school in Classical Chinese Philosophy), and is also the single most frequently translated Chinese classic. This is a bilingual edition of a standard translation.Comment: This is a highly influential and still excellent English translation of the Laozi. It is essential reading on Daoism.
Laozi, trans. Richard John Lynn. The Classic of the Way and Virtue: A New Translation of the Tao-te ching of Laozi as Interpreted by Wang Bi
1999, Columbia University Press
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, Contributed by: I Xuan ChongPublisher’s Note:
The Laozi is a key text in Daoism/Taoism (a school in Classical Chinese Philosophy), and is also the single most frequently translated Chinese classic. This edition features a translation "as interpreted by Wang Bi" (a highly influential ancient commentator). This approach aligns closely with common practice in the Chinese-speaking world.Comment: This is essential primary reading on Daoism that is sensitive to the Laozi's ancient reception.
León-Portilla, Miguel. Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind
1963, University of Oklahoma Press
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Added by: M. Jimena Clavel Vázquez and Andrés Hernández Villarreal
Publisher's note: For at least two millennia before the advent of the Spaniards in 1519, there was a flourishing civilization in central Mexico. During that long span of time a cultural evolution took place which saw a high development of the arts and literature, the formulation of complex religious doctrines, systems of education, and diverse political and social organization.The rich documentation concerning these people, commonly called Aztecs, includes, in addition to a few codices written before the Conquest, thousands of folios in the Nahuatl or Aztec language written by natives after the Conquest. Adapting the Latin alphabet, which they had been taught by the missionary friars, to their native tongue, they recorded poems, chronicles, and traditions.
The fundamental concepts of ancient Mexico presented and examined in this book have been taken from more than ninety original Aztec documents. They concern the origin of the universe and of life, conjectures on the mystery of God, the possibility of comprehending things beyond the realm of experience, life after death, and the meaning of education, history, and art. The philosophy of the Nahuatl wise men, which probably stemmed from the ancient doctrines and traditions of the Teotihuacans and Toltecs, quite often reveals profound intuition and in some instances is remarkably “modern.”
This English edition is not a direct translation of the original Spanish, but an adaptation and rewriting of the text for the English-speaking reader.
Comment: available in this Blueprint
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