Social Ethics

In this groundbreaking book, the philosopher Martin Hägglund challenges our received notions of faith and freedom. The faith we need to cultivate, he argues, is not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He reveals that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions. What ultimately matters is how we treat one another in this life, and what we do with our time together.

Sénèque est un philosophe, un dramaturge et un homme d'État du premier siècle après Jésus-Christ. Il a été en charge de l'éducation de Néron, futur Empereur de Rome. Sa pensée se situe en filiation avec le Stoïcisme grec, mais la notion de système est mise à distance au profit de considérations davantage morales que métaphysiques.

On the Genealogy of Morality (The Genealogy of Morals) is an 1887 book by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It consists of a preface and three interrelated essays that expand and follow through on concepts Nietzsche sketched out in Beyond Good and Evil. The three essays trace episodes in the evolution of moral concepts with a view to confronting moral prejudices, specifically those of Christianity and Judaism. Some Nietzsche scholars consider Genealogy to be a work of sustained brilliance and power as well as his masterpiece.

Spinoza's brilliant metaphysical system was derived neither from reality nor experience. Starting from basic assumptions, with a series of geometric proofs he built a universe which was also God, one and the same thing, the classic example of pantheism. Although his system seems an oddity today, Spinoza's conclusions are deeply in accord with modern thought, from science (the holistic ethics of today's ecologists) to politics (the idea that the state exists to protect the individual).

A call to save ourselves and our planet by targeting the root of our inaction: extreme shortsightedness.

Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche's position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically rejects traditional Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche seeks to demonstrate that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a 'slave morality'. With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual impose their own 'will to power' upon the world.

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies.

Should Christians be politically withdrawn, avoiding participation in politics to maintain their prophetic voice and to keep from being used as political pawns? Or should Christians be actively involved, seeking to utilize political systems to control the levers of power? In Jesus and the Powers, N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird call Christians everywhere to discern the nature of Christian witness in fractured political environments.

For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn, Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother's secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father—and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival.

Anthony Appiah's landmark work, featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, challenges the separatist doctrines espoused in books like Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. Reviving the ancient philosophy of "cosmopolitanism", a school of thought that dates to the Cynics of the fourth century BC, Appiah traces its influence on the ethical legacies of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Alongside a lively tour of traditional moral reasoning from thinkers like Plato, Mill, and Kant, Rieder posits new questions and exercises about the unique conundrums we now face, issues that can seem to transcend old-fashioned philosophical ideals. Should you drink water from a plastic bottle or not? Drive an electric car? When you learn about the horrors of factory farming, should you stop eating meat or other animal products? Do small commitments matter, or are we being manipulated into acting certain ways by corporations and media?

Iris Murdoch once observed: 'philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious'. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything—even God. Throughout her distinguished and prolific writing career, she explored questions of Good and Bad, myth and morality. The framework for Murdoch's questions—and her own conclusions—can be found here.

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood - facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf - his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.

Robert B. Reich makes a powerful case for the expansion of America’s moral imagination. Rooting his argument in common sense and everyday reality, he demonstrates that a common good constitutes the very essence of any society or nation. Societies, he says, undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce the common good as well as vicious cycles that undermine it, one of which America has been experiencing for the past five decades. This process can and must be reversed.

Is philosophy obsolete? Are the ancient questions still relevant in the age of cosmology and neuroscience, not to mention crowd-sourcing and cable news? The acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today’s debates on religion, morality, politics, and science.

From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum’s groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before.

Compilación de 12 escritos del Emperador y filósofo romano Marco Aurelio, quien destacó por su serenidad, su modestia y su búsqueda de la verdad, a la vez que fue un césar brillante en el campo de batalla.

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the 20th-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel.

Para los antiguos, la justicia iba mucho más allá que lo que sucedía en un tribunal. Era mucho más urgente que las ideas que se debatían en las aulas de Filosofía. Implicaba una forma de vida, el compromiso personal de hacer lo correcto por difícil que fuera.

What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combinationof passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine.