Clearly written with elucidating examples...Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice

this is among the most compelling and original books I have read in recent moral philosophy and it deserves a wide readership. Katsafanas is to be credited with opening up new lines of inquiry about just how deeply held our values must be in order for our evaluative lives to be coherent in the first place.

Michael Cholbi, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Over the course of this important book Katsafanas proves himself a model philosophical companion: clear, patient, meticulous and transparent about what his arguments can and can't achieve... It's rich philosophical terrain, and he maps and cultivates it insightfully.

Clare Carlisle, Times Literary Supplement

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Fanaticism is one of the many very interesting phenomena under examination in Paul Katsafanas' fascinating new book Philosophy of Devotion... In describing human devotional activity and cataloguing a set of phenomena that are both fascinating and under-theorized in secular moral philosophy, Katsafanas prompts many critical existential questions of value.

Simone Gubler, European Journal of Philosophy

Why do people persist in commitments that threaten their happiness, security, and comfort? Why do some of our most central, identity-defining commitments seem to resist the effects of reasoning and critical reflection? Drawing on real-life examples, empirical psychology, and philosophical reflection, Paul Katsafanas argues that these commitments involve an ethical stance called devotion, which plays a pervasive--but often hidden--role in human life. Devotion typically involves sacralizing certain values, goals, or relationships. To sacralize a value is to treat it as inviolable (trade-offs with ordinary values are forbidden), incontestable (even contemplating such trade-offs is prohibited), and dialectically invulnerable (no rational considerations can disrupt the agent's commitment to the value). Philosophy of Devotion offers a detailed philosophical account and defense of these features. Devotion and the sacralization of values can be reasonable; indeed, a life involving meaningful, sustained commitment depends on these stances. Without devotion, we risk an existential condition that Katsafanas describes as normative dissipation, in which all of our commitments become etiolated. Yet devotion can easily go wrong, deforming into the individual and group fanaticism that have become pervasive features of modern social life. Katsafanas provides an alternative to fanaticism, investigating the way in which we can express non-pathological forms of devotion. We can be devoted through affirmation and through what Katsafanas calls the deepening move, which treats the agent's central commitments as systematically inchoate. Each of these stances enables a wholehearted form of devotion that nevertheless preserves flexibility and openness, avoiding the dangers of fanaticism on the one hand and normative dissipation on the other. But this is inevitably a fragile and precarious achievement: affirmation can slide into a focus on rejecting what isn't affirmed, and the deepening move can ossify into rigidity. Only the perpetual quest to maintain a form of existential flexibility, which may require oscillation between affirmation and deepening, can stave off these dangers
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Paul Katsafanas examines the role of devotion as an ethical stance in human life. Devotion typically involves treating certain values, goals, or relationships as inviolable, incontestable, and invulnerable to argument. Katsafanas argues that devotion can be reasonable, and suggests how it can avoid deforming into fanaticism.
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Acknowledgements 1: The Longing for Devotion 2: The Nature of Sacred Values 3: Resisting Comparisons of Comparable Items 4: Devotion and Dialectical Invulnerability 5: Nihilism and the Abundance of Values 6: The Enlightenment Account of Fanaticism 7: Fanaticism as Individual Pathology 8: Group Fanaticism and Narratives of Ressentiment 9: Irony, Affirmation, and the Appeal of Inarticulacy 10: Conclusion References
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Paul Katsafanas is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and works on ethics, moral psychology, and nineteenth-century philosophy. He is the author of The Nietzschean Self (OUP, 2016), Agency and the Foundations of Ethics (OUP, 2013), and approximately thirty articles that have appeared in leading journals and edited volumes.
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Provides a novel account of devotion and its connection to sacred values Explains how fanaticism is encouraged by resentment-stoking narratives Explores the way in which we long for opportunities to express devotion
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780192867674
Publisert
2022
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press
Vekt
548 gr
Høyde
240 mm
Bredde
164 mm
Dybde
20 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
246

Forfatter

Biografisk notat

Paul Katsafanas is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and works on ethics, moral psychology, and nineteenth-century philosophy. He is the author of The Nietzschean Self (OUP, 2016), Agency and the Foundations of Ethics (OUP, 2013), and approximately thirty articles that have appeared in leading journals and edited volumes.