Description
Book SynopsisThis two-volume work examines far-reaching debates on the concept of courage from Greek antiquity to the Christian and mediaeval periods, as well as the modern era. Volume 1 explains how competing accounts of epistêmê, rational wisdom, and truth dominated classical antiquity. Early Christian and mediaeval thinkers, in contrast, favoured fortitude founded on faith and fear of God over philosophical reasoning left to its own devices.
Volume 2 turns to theories of courage from the early modern period to the present. It shows how the twin laws of polis and physis are at the heart of post-medieval thought. Courage is found at the crossroads of love and dread, freedom and fate, happiness and suffering, as well as power and submission to the ruling order. The later influence of evolutionism, existentialism, and the social and natural sciences on moral philosophy is also addressed at some length. The protection of people's best interests, the passions and powers of the human will, and the rule of active energy in all aspects of life supplant courage formerly viewed through the lens of reason or faith, or a combination of the two.
These new ideas, paradoxically, herald the end of the ethics of courage. They also undermine the courage of ethical thinking. Courage is no longer an end in itself, nor is it a means to happiness "at the end." Regardless of what Gandhi, Tillich, and Foucault have to say about the topic, late modernity and the global age witness a marked loss of interest in courage as an idea worthy of conceptual investigation. Debates about the moral implications of courage give way to the value-free science of resilience, which studies how people can recover from past trauma and find wellness, primarily in the realm of
physis.
Table of Contents1 Truth, Power, and Life
2 The Body and the Body Politic
3 Self-interest and the Sovereign
4 Justice, the Laws of Nature, and God
5 Moral Sympathy and Higher Passions
6 The Natural and Rational Duty to God and Country
7 Michel de Montaigne and the Vanity of Reason
8 Language, Self-consciousness, and Learning Experiences
9 Reasons Examined in Good Conscience
10 The Evolution of Mind, Species, and Society
11 Variations in Evolutionary Ethics
12 Utilitarianism and Relativism with a Bias
13 Emerson’s Heroes of Truth
14 The Courage of Despair
15 Nietzsche’s Animal Foes and Friends
16 The Will to Power
17 Thus Spoke Nietzsche
18 Courage in the Body and the Sociable Self
19 The Courage of Disobedience
20 Paul Tillich and the Courage to Be
21 Throwing Courage to the Dogs
22 Risk and Resilience
23 Courage in the Global Age
