O texto investiga algumas dimensões do pensamento de Levinas em relação aos temas da linguagem, justiça, perdão e pluralidade, entre outros, a partir da leitura talmúdica “Envers Autrui”, estabelecendo relações com alguns aspectos da filosofia analítica e do pensamento do Kant e William Galston.

Originally published in 1958, this book shows how a systematic consideration of what exactly may be meant by calling anything 'good', inevitably leads on to the more general and fundamental problem of the relations between value-judgments and statements of fact. It does on to explain some of the difficult and far-reaching issues which this problem involves. The book is intended as an introduction for students interested in finding out the nature and point of modern methods of philosophic analysis when applied (...) to problems of moral philosophy. (shrink)

As a young lecturer in philosophy and the eldest son of a prominent Jewish family, Alan Montefiore faced two very different understandings of his identity: the more traditional view that an identity such as his carried with it, as a matter of given fact, certain duties and obligations, and an opposing view, emphasized by his studies in philosophy, according to which there can be no rationally compelling move from statements of fact—whatever the alleged facts may be—to "judgments of (...) value." According to this second view, individuals must in the end take responsibility for determining their own values and obligations. In this book, Montefiore looks back on his attempts to understand the nature of this conflict and the misunderstandings it may engender. In the process, he illustrates through personal experience the practical implications of a characteristically philosophical issue. Montefiore finally settles on the following: while everyone has to accept that facts, including those of their own situation, are whatever they may be, both the "traditional" assumption that individuals must recognize certain values and obligations as rooted in those very facts, and the contrary view that individuals are ultimately responsible for determining their own values, are deeply embedded in differing conceptions of society and its relation to its members. Montefiore then examines the misunderstandings between those for whom identity constitutes in effect a conceptual bridge connecting the facts of who and what a person may be to the value commitments incumbent upon them, and those for whom the very idea of such a bridge can be nothing but a confusion. Using key examples from the notoriously vexed case of Jewish identity and from his own encounters with its conflicting meanings and implications, Montefiore depicts the practical significance of the differences between these worldviews, particularly for those who hove to negotiate them. (shrink)

Rorty makes a number of broadly convergent distinctions between different types of philosopher or philosophy. His own expressed view - or apparent view - that what he calls abnormal or edifying discourse is parasitically dependent on a prior acceptation of the norms of normality is fundamentally, even ‘foundationally’, correct. Any too reckless or too persistently sustained defiance of these norms or of this dependence is bound to involve a refusal of various orders of responsibility; including perhaps both moral and political (...) responsibilities. There can, of course, be no straightforward proof that Rorty’s texts, stimulating and fruitful as they indisputably are, involve any of these irresponsibilities; indeed, he would no doubt accept the gist of much of the argument which seeks to make them explicit. It is nevertheless worrying to find him saying the things that he does say about the allegedly unbridgeable differences between ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ philosophy; and·. though he might reply that one should not here take what he says as being the expression of a view on a matter of so-called fact, the factual inaccuracies of the views that he might ‘normally’ be taken to be expressing here are only too likely to be more misleading than fruitful, more harmful than harmless. (shrink)

Alan Montefiore explains how Kant's moral philosophy fits into and depends on the wider sweep of his work.

First published in 1975, this is a book of general intellectual interest about the role of the university in contemporary society and that of university teachers in relation to their subjects, their students, and their wider political commitments. Alan Montefiore offers preliminary analyses of the family of concepts most often invoked in discussions of these problems, taking the central dispute to be between those who hold a 'liberal' view of the university and those who regard this notion as (...) illusory, dishonest or undesirable. Six academics, representing, discuss issues of substantive conflict in light of Montefiore's initial distinctions. The volume is of particular interest to students of political and social philosophy, and political and educational theory. It is also intended for a wider readership among those who care about the political status of the universities and recognize the importance and difficulty of the problems involved in this. (shrink)

I first met Pamela way back in the 1980s, when I found myself acting as supervisor of her doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. As I read her later writing and look back on her career, I am most struck by, on the one hand, the marked contrast between the vulnerability and uncertainties, both philosophical and personal, of her earlier time and the assurance of her later writing; and, on the other, the persistence throughout the continuing narrative of (...) her life of an essential interconnection between her deepest philosophical and personal concerns. These include, most notably, the importance of taking, each of us, one’s sense of one’s own vulnerability not as a reason for the construction of walls behind which to shelter from others but rather as a base from which to reach out to them in a spirit of what Pamela did not hesitate to call “love.”. (shrink)

_Integrity in the Private and Public Domains_ explores the issue of public and private integrity in politics, the media, health, science, fund-raising, the economy and the public sector. Over twenty essays by well-known figures such as Amelie Rorty, David Vines, the late Hugo Gryn, Alan Montefiore and Hilary Lawson present a compelling insight into debates over integrity today. A key chapter of the book concerns the highly publicised donation to Oxford University by Gert-Rudolf Flick, an issue which attracted (...) wide media attention by raising questions of fund-raising and the holocaust. (shrink)

This book collects essays by Alan Montefiore on the role philosophy plays in the formation of the self, and how philosophical questions regarding the nature of reason, truth, and identity inform ethics and politics. It offers a comprehensive overview of Montefiore's influential, non-dogmatic philosophical voice. Throughout his 70-year career, Montefiore sought to bridge the analytic/continental divide and develop a new way of thinking about philosophy. He defines philosophy as the search for a higher-order understanding of whatever (...) the situation or activity in which one may be involved or engaged, an understanding which may be achieved and expressed by and in a variety of different forms of philosophical persuasion, and which may serve to shed new light on particular problems. The book's essays, half of which are previously unpublished, are divided into two thematic sections. The first focuses on the nature of philosophy, while the second addresses the relationship between philosophy and moral and political responsibilities. Philosophy and the Human Paradox will be of interest to philosophers and students who work on ethics, Kantian and post-Kantian continental philosophy, and political philosophy. (shrink)

The question to which I seek here to address myself may be formulated in the following way. Is philosophy to be thought of as essentially one and the same subject in all its different manifestations, carried on, certainly, in noticeably differing ways by different people at different times and in different places, but to be understood nevertheless as consisting of one overall body of knowledge? Or should the term ‘philosophy’ be regarded rather as standing for a ‘family resemblance concept’, and (...) the family in question as containing among its members some who may be hardly capable of establishing any mutually agreed channels of communication with each other? In what follows I shall try to display, if not necessarily to disentangle, some of the underlying complexities on which, as it seems to me, answers to these questions may depend. (shrink)

Le dispositif: un texte de Louis Marin sur la pluralité du sens , où « langage ordinaire » renvoie au discours du « peuple » qui ne saitpas discerner la « raison des effets » de sens dans son discours; Marin l'a écrit en anglais, d'ailleurs émaillé ou doublé de fiançais, Montefiore n'en posséde qu'une traduction, et c'est elle qu'il retraduit en anglais — traduction de traduction avec l' original seulement en fin de parcours. L'analyse de Montefiore, lisant (...) Marin lisant Pascal, porte sur la force du discours et les forces d'une langue, illocutoires, mais non moins politiques dans ce français-là : si l'on peut en philosophic, entre science et littérature, rendre tout d'une langue à l'autre, n'est-il pas pourtant inevitable que les choses feel different ? (shrink)

Eleven leading contemporary French philosophers give here more or less direct presentations and exemplifications of their work. All the essays, with one exception, were specifically written for this volume and for an English-speaking readership - the exception is the first publication anywhere of Jacques Derrida's defence of his thèse d'état in 1980, based on his published works. As a collection the essays convey the style, tone and preoccupations, as well as the range and diversity, of French philosophical thinking as it (...) is being practised today. They will stimulate and inform the rapidly growing interest in this area outside France. (shrink)

The relation between moral philosophy and moral practice is itself philosophically controversial. nor is there any one determinate formula through which to express the relations between the basic principles of morality and of rationality itself. the concepts of the moral and the political are both 'essentially contestable' and so too is the nature of their relations; that is, their analysis is itself of moral and political import. nevertheless, in periods of overall stability, this contestability may hardly be apparent. all this, (...) and its connection with philosophy's fundamental commitment to questioning and self-awareness has a deep significance for moral (and political) education. (shrink)

In fact, only one book on or around Marxism has been received for survey during the year that is past, though there are perhaps few British philosophers who would see anything for surprise or regret in that. Among the books not received, however, are two of very considerable interest and intelligence, which it would be wrong not to mention for the sake of anyone who may be unaware of their existence; Merleau Ponty's Les aventures de la dialectique and Raymond Aron's (...) L’opium des intellectuels . Both books appeared at roughly the same time as a British critic was rash enough publicly to lament that political philosophy was dead in France. Quite apart from anything else, this seems an odd complaint of a country in which Marxism, be it for better or for worse, is very much a live intellectual influence. Classical Marxism may indeed be what Professor Acton calls “a philosophical farrago,” but it would be a bad mistake to treat it as no more than a dead doctrinal body, to be dissected and preserved, if at all, as simply an historical curiosity. What the intellectuals of the world’s next generation or two will be saying may be anybody's guess; but that a very large proportion of them will be saying it in Marxist or Marxist–derived terminology seems a safe prediction. When for any reason a certain vocabulary is placed beyond the bounds of critical questioning, all development must take the form of interpretation and application. But to say this is very different from saying that all development is brought to a halt. (shrink)

This is the first collection of papers covering the main trends in moral British philosophy in the 20th century. It has three sections. Roots, Theories and Applications. The articles are signed by: C. Kirwan, Jim MacAdam,Rom Harre, Catherine Audard, Roger Crisp, David McNaughton, Onora O'Neill, John Lucas, Bernard Williams.

The eighth Congrès des Sociétés de Philosophic de Langue Française at Toulouse, which, I should perhaps explain, was the first gathering of its sort to which I have been, was just about as unlike a Joint Session as an English philosopher might well have imagined it to be. Many of the differences arose naturally from the simple facts that French philosophy is very unlike British and that philosophers in France are greeted with banquets, civic receptions, concerts and other hospitable entertainments (...) when they meet together in congress. But there are other differences too. For one thing, the contributions are not only as a rule very different in content; they are also different in form. A general theme is set with a certain number of sub–headings. Then anybody who wishes may submit a “communication,” having if possible at least some appearance of relevance to the titular theme–though if this is not possible, it doesn't seem to matter very much as it may be included all the same. Obviously enough, if some share of the available space and time is to be given to every philosopher who wants it, , nobody is going to get very much. The result of all this is to be seen for this year in the Acts of the Congress L'Homme et son prochain , where hardly any of the no less than 76 contributors has more than four pages to himself. In the circumstances it would have been wholly surprising if such Acts had turned out to be anything other than a mainly tedious assortment of mostly undistinguished fragments, which is not, I fear, likely to prove of much interest to any reader of this Survey; which is a pity, as it is not only the receptions and the outings that make this Congress worth attending. (shrink)