The Art of Living Well: Moral Experience and Virtue Ethics
Ebook
In this first English translation of the prize-winning Dutch title Leven is Een Kunst, Paul van Tongeren creates a new kind of virtue ethics, one that centres on how to 'live well' in our contemporary world.
While virtue ethics is based on the moral philosophy of Aristotle, it has had many interpretations and iterations throughout history and features prominently in the thinking of the Stoics, Christian narratives and the writings of Nietzsche. The Art of Living Well explores and expands upon these traditions, using them as a basis to form a new interpretation; one that foregrounds art and creativity as paramount to the struggle to act in an authentic and moral way.
Acting as both a clear introduction to virtue ethics and moral philosophy and a serious work of original philosophy, this book connects philosophy with real lived experience and tackles, head-on, the perennial philosophical question: 'how do we live well?'
The first English translation of Leven is Een Kunst, an absorbing book in which the prominent ethicist and Nietzsche specialist Paul van Tongeren proposes a new form of ethics as an art of living
This book won the Socrates Cup 2013, the prize for the best philosophical book in Dutch
The author, Paul Van Tongeren, is a world renowned ethicist and Nietzsche expert
The book was a bestseller in Holland and is now in it's 3rd edition
The art of living and of living well is of perennial importance to philosophers and the philosophically-minded more generally
INTRODUCTION
Art
I. ETHICS AND MEANING
Attention
II HERMENEUTICS AND EXPERIENCE
Relations
III VIRTUE AND PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
Love
IV GREEK AND CHRISTIAN
Patience
V NIETZSCHE AND/OR ARISTOTLE
Shame
VI VIRTUE ETHICS IN A DISENCHANTED WORLD
Aphorisms
Ambitious in scope, clearly written, and accessible to both academics and laymen, Paul van Tongeren's proposed 'hermeneutical ethics' ventures to construct a modern virtue ethics for a secular world in tension with its own meaninglessness, while still respecting alternative ethical theories as interpretations of unique aspects of moral experience.
Human relations and the will to practise ethics, as opposed to merely theorising about its foundations, are the main focus of this work that enables us to transform our life in such a way as to consider it the privileged object of a special, refined, and philosophically oriented form of art.
Paul van Tongeren's highly readable book not only updates MacIntyre's After Virtue by putting it in dialogue with new and different thinkers, it also recalls its predecessor's philosophical ambition and impressive breadth of reference. One of its key accomplishments is to bring together virtue ethics with philosophy as a way of life. Anglophone readers will particularly benefit from the author's attention to Dutch and German exponents of the ethics of self-cultivation. Students of Aristotle and Nietzsche will also find much here to think over. It deserves to be widely read, enjoyed, and debated.
- Title: The Art of Living Well: Moral Experience and Virtue Ethics
- Authors: Paul van Tongeren, Thomas Heij
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350012851, 9781350012875, 1350012874, 1350012858
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350012851
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-11T00:16:05Z
Paul van Tongeren is Professor of Moral Philosophy and Ethical Theory at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Special Professor of Ethics at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven, Belgium; and Associate Researcher at the University of Pretoria, South Africa
Thomas Heij studied philosophy at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and works as editor at the Nexus Institute