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This book attempts to open up a path towards a phenomenological theory of values (more technically, a phenomenological axiology). By drawing on everyday experience, and dissociating the notion of value from that of tradition, it shows how emotional sensibility can be integrated to practical reason. This project was prompted by the persuasion that the fragility of democracy, and the current public irrelevance of the ideal principles which support it, largely depend on the inability of modern philosophy to overcome the well-entrenched skepticism about the power of practical reason. The book begins with a phenomenology of cynical consciousness, continues with a survey of still influential theories of value rooted in 20th century philosophy, and finally offers an outline of a bottom-up axiology that revives the anti-skeptical legacy of phenomenology, without ignoring the standards set by contemporary metaethics.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. Phenomenology of the Cynical Consciousness.- 3. Where is Socrates?.- 4. The Normative Embodiment of Practical Reason.- 5. Truth Suspended.- 6. Value: Prolegomena to a Phenomenological Axiology.
About the author
Roberta De Monticelli is currently Full Professor for Philosophy of Personhood at San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy. She has been Full Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Geneva, Switzerland (1989-2004). She is Chief Editor of "Phenomenology and Mind". Among her books:
L'avenir de la phénoménologie (1997) and
L'ascèse philosophique - Phénoménologie et Platonisme (1995).
Report
"De Monticelli's book provides a means to restore the axiological underpinnings of careful moral debate that have been neglected or undermined by a century of indifferent sophistic foxes." (Eugene Kelly, PHENOMENOLOGY AND MIND, Issue 23, 2022)
