The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love

by Susan R. Wolf

For over thirty years Susan Wolf has been writing about moral and nonmoral values and the relation between them. This volume collects Wolf's most important essays on the topics of morality, love, and meaning, ranging from her classic essay "Moral Saints" to her most recent "The Importance of Love."
Wolf's essays warn us against the common tendency to classify values in terms of a dichotomy that contrasts the personal, self-interested, or egoistic with the impersonal, altruistic or moral. On Wolf's view, this tendency ignores or distorts the significance of such values as love, beauty, and truth, and neglects the importance of meaningfulness as a dimension of the good life.
These essays show us how a self-conscious recognition of the variety of values leads to new understandings of the point, the content, and the limits of morality and to new ways of thinking about happiness and well-being.

Genres: Philosophy

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 26, 2014

About the author

Susan R. Wolf (born 1952) is a moral philosopher and philosopher of action who is the Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Wolf earned a BA from Yale University in philosophy and mathematics and a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University with a dissertation directed by Thomas Nagel.

Before taking up her current position at North Carolina, Wolf taught at Harvard University, the University of Maryland, and the Johns Hopkins University.

Wolf was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and of the American Philosophical Society in 2006. She received a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities in 2002.

Her husband, Douglas MacLean, is also a philosopher teaching at UNC-Chapel Hill.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[jeremiah]

For whatever positivist reason, analytic philosophers have spent most of their time examining questions concerning language, logic, and mind rather than questions concerning humanity and practical life. Sure, things have changed now, but not without Wolf's groundbreaking work. In my view, Wolf is one of the greatest philosophers to have shown that the analytic tradition has been mistaken in its narrow focus and that there is so much more enriching work still to be done concerning, say, love, meaning in life, and the very point of morality itself.

[R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very practical, novel, and immensely readable moral phil.