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Peter Poellner identifies and sets out the tenets of existential modernism, a strand in twentieth-century ethics. The book examines its development in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and offers an interpretation of Robert Musil's
The Man without Qualities.
List of contents
- 1: How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche on Overcoming the Tyranny of the Real
- 2: Later Nietzsche: Value, Affect, and Objectivity
- 3: Nietzsche s Evaluative Practice: Ethics and Aesthetics
- 4: The Scheler-Sartre View of Emotion and Value: Defending Qualified Affective Perceptualism
- 5: Indistinctness in Value Experience
- 6: Distorted Value Experience and Intentional Self-Deception
- 7: Freedom, Ethics, and Absolute Value: Early Sartre s Two Philosophies
- Appendix: Beyond Moral Principles
- 8: Modernity, Cultural Discontent, and the Experience of Wholeness: Robert Musil s The Man without Qualities
- Conclusion
About the author
Peter Poellner studied at Edinburgh and Oxford, obtaining a DPhil in Philosophy at Oxford in 1989. From 1990 to 2020 he taught in the Philosophy Department of Warwick University, from 2009 as Professor of Philosophy. He remains associated with Warwick University as Emeritus Professor (since January 2021). His research interests include philosophy of value, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, history of philosophy (especially Nietzsche, Husserl, Scheler, Sartre, and Musil).
Summary
Peter Poellner identifies and sets out the tenets of existential modernism, a strand in twentieth-century ethics. The book examines its development in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and offers an interpretation of Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities.
Additional text
Peter Poellner's Value in Modernity is a subtle, powerfully argued work that straddles the analytic and continental traditions. A lifetime's immersion in the texts under discussion enables Poellner to uncover themes and arguments to which many scholars (myself included) have been entirely blind. Many of the individual discussions are of the highest quality. At times, however, the argumentation is more overpowering than powerful.
