Problems of Ethics
Description:... "Many of the early positivists, such as Carnap and Reichenbach, assumed that the basic tenets of positivism made it unsuitable for many of the classical topics of philosophical discourse, especially in ethics. Moritz Schlick, however, the renowned leader of the "Vienna Circle", disputed their assumption in this major work on ethics. In it he demonstrated that positivism actually is well equipped to deal with normative issues and that ethics can have a cognitive content. This was a successful refutation of many of the critics of logical positivism and even was startling to many of the positivists themselves. The book caused considerable excitement when it was first published thirty years ago, and now had come to be regarded as a classic counter to many over-subtle and anti-rational views of ethics held today. Schlick found he was able to apply the positivist approach to a surprisingly large number of the problems of traditional ethics—motivation, freedom and responsibility, applied his scientific method to such diverse problems as the prejudice against pleasure, the pleasure of pain, and the act of martyrdom. His book accurately reviews and criticizes the major approaches to ethics in a completely clear, straightforward manner, finding background for its discourse from such interesting sources as Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Beethoven, and Anatole France. Throughout the entire book Schlick never strays from his strictly scientific approach to the problems of moral conduct—his aim is to gather, clarify, and analyze, not to admonish or exhort."-Publisher.
Show description