Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Continental Philosophy

by Mark Dooley (Editor), Richard Kearney (Editor)

This major discussion takes a look at some of the most important ethical issues confronting us today by some of the world’s leading thinkers. Including essays from leading thinkers, such as Jurgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Julia Kristeva and Paul Ricoeur, the book’s highlight – an interview with Jacques Derrida - presents the most accessible insight into his thinking on ethics and politics for many years. Exploring topics ranging from history, memory, revisionism, and the self and responsibility to democracy, multiculturalism, feminism and the future of politics, the essays are grouped into five thematic

* hermeneutics



* deconstruction



* critical theory



* psychoanalysis



* applied ethics.

Each section considers the challenges posed by ethics and how critical thinking has transformed philosophy today. Questioning Ethics affords an unsurpassed overview of the state of ethical thinking today by some of the world’s foremost philosophers.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 19, 1998

About the author

Mark Dooley is an Irish philosopher, writer, journalist, public speaker and academic. He is also a regular radio broadcaster and guest of TV shows, and has in addition served as a speech writer. He has led a journalistic and an academic career simultaneously. He is a specialist of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion and theology. He wrote a study of Søren Kierkegaard's ethical, religious and cultural insights, and then moved on to interrogating conceptions of God and ethics, which led to the publication of two collections of essays. He then published a monograph on Roger Scruton and a collection of Scruton's texts, and was called by the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland to write about the ways forward for the Irish Catholic Church in the wake of the abuse revelations. In Moral Matters: A Philosophy of Homecoming, he develops his own philosophy and outlines his intellectual journey for the first time. Meanwhile, he is also a regular guest on the Irish radio and a columnist. [Wikipedia]

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Like a man strolling down a familiar street, philosophy moves with ease within certain settled and well-established distinctions -- like the distinctions between presence and representation, reality and image, necessity and contingency, truth and fiction, and -- this is what particularly interests me here -- the possible and the impossible. But very interesting writers like Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault have made a name for themselves showing, to the scandal of (a self-proclaimed and self-congratulatory) "reason," how representation precedes presence, images structure reality, truths are fictions that have taken hold, and how the possible is quite pedestrian and boring while everything we truly desire is impossible, the impossible being what we love most of all. Stamped by the success of these analyses, philosophers of a more classical frame of mind have come to think that the time is out of joint and a destructive anarchy has been unleashed upon the land. Derrida, impudent and impish to the end, rejoins that being out of joint is just what makes justice possible for those who are enjoined and in bind, that a strategic dose of anarchy is just what opens things up if you happen to be at the bottom end of a hierarchy."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgwOj...