The enlightenment of sympathy: justice and the moral sentiments in the eighteenth century and today

The Enlightenment is commonly referred to as 'The Age of Reason.' The term signifies the triumph of rationalism over emotionalism and sentiment in the lateeighteenth century. Rationalists, the most famous of whom was Kant, posited amind that was hierarchically arranged, with reason sitting atop of the passions. Yet as Michael Frazer argues, there were in fact two enlightenments--the sentimentalist enlightenment and the rationalist one--and the Enlightenment of Sympathy reclaims the importance of the former. As he explains, enlightened sentimentalism encompassed more than 'mere feeling' (as its critics claimed) andin fact harnessed the human mind in full to offer a positive account of the sentiments' centrality to moral and political reflection. Rather than treating the mind as a hierarchy, sentimentalists offered a more egalitarian theory of it. The mind, in their view, was integrated, and its various compartments wereequals. Many of the most famous Enlightenment thinkers can rightly be called sentimentalists-- Hume, Smith, and Herder, to name a few--yet the rationalist vision of politics has proven to be more influential. In fact, the most important political philosopher of liberalism of the past half century, John Rawls, relied on the rationalist enlightenment for his most important work. By reclaiming this equally important strand of enlightenment thought, Frazer not only offers a corrective to the dominant narrative of the Enlightenment political thought. His argument will also enrich contemporary political theory by integrating a more behaviorally-oriented and psychologically complex account of the mind into the corpus of liberal philosophy. INDICE: Acknowledgements; Introduction: A Tale of Two Enlightenments; 1.: Sentimentalism Before Hume; I. The New Science of Human Nature; II. Religious and Metaphysical Foundations; III. Theories of Justice; 2.: Hume's Free-Standing Sentimentalism; I. Sympathy and the Moral Sentiments; II. Moral Development; III. Hume's Normative Theory; 3.: Hume's Conservative Sentimentalism; I. Hume's Theory of Justice; II. The Sentimentalist Case Against Hume's Theory; 4.: Adam Smith's Liberal Sentimentalism; I. The Alleged Incompatibility of Sentimentalism with Individualism; II. The Space Between Actor and Spectator: Sympathy and Moral Judgment; III. The Space Between Actors: Justice and Natural Jurisprudence; 5.: Kant's Abandonment of Sentimentalism; I. The Critical-Period Position on the Foundations of Morals; II. The Critical-Period Normative Evaluation of Sympathy; III. The Critical-Period Theory of Affects and Passions; IV. A Contrasting Pre-Critical Position; 6.: Herder's Pluralist Sentimentalism; I. Sentimentalism and the Problem of Diversity; II. From Sympathy to Diversity; III. From Diversity to Empathetic Understanding; IV. From Empathetic Understanding to Justice; 7.: Sentimentalism Today; I. Sentimentalism and Social Science; II. Sentimentalism and Normative Theory; III. Sentimentalism and Political Practice; Bibliography

• ISBN: 978-0-19-539066-7
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Cartoné
• Páginas: 256
• Fecha Publicación: 26/08/2010
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés