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  1. ‘Fine, Invisible Threads’: Schopenhauer on the Cognitively Mediated Structure of Motivation.Sean T. Murphy - 2022 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 4 (1):1-22.
    The central claim of Schopenhauer’s account of human motivation is that ‘cognition is the medium of motives’. In light of motivation’s cognitively mediated structure, he contends that human beings are caused to act by ‘mere thoughts’, what he refers to metaphorically as ‘fine, invisible threads’. Despite this avowedly intellectualist handling of the subject, some commentators remain convinced that Schopenhauer is best read as accepting the ‘Humean truism’ that reason alone never motivates; rather, motivation always has its source in desire together (...)
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  • Schopenhauer and Modern Moral Philosophy.Stephen Puryear - 2023 - In David Bather Woods & Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian mind. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 228-40.
    Anscombe counsels us to dispense with those moral concepts that presuppose a divine law conception of ethics, among which she numbers the concepts of “moral obligation and moral duty, […] of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’.” Schopenhauer made a similar point more than a century earlier, though his critique implicates a narrower range of concepts. Through reflection on his accounts of right and wrong and of duty and obligation, this chapter attempts to (...)
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  • Virtue and the Problem of Egoism in Schopenhauer's Moral Philosophy.Patrick Hassan - 2021 - In Schopenhauer's Moral Philosophy. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
    It has previously been argued that Schopenhauer is a distinctive type of virtue ethicist (Hassan, 2019). The Aristotelian version of virtue ethics has traditionally been accused of being fundamentally egoistic insofar as the possession of virtues is beneficial to the possessor, and serve as the ultimate justification for obtaining them. Indeed, Schopenhauer himself makes a version of this complaint. In this chapter, I investigate whether Schopenhauer’s moral framework nevertheless suffers from this same objection of egoism in light of how he (...)
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  • Schopenhauer's Titus Argument.Colin Marshall - 2021 - In Patrick Hassan (ed.), Schopenhauer's Moral Philosophy. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
    In one of his arguments for taking compassion to be the basis of morality, Schopenhauer offers a thought experiment involving two characters: Titus and Caius. The 'Titus Argument,' as I call it, has been misunderstood by many of Schopenhauer's readers, but is, I argue, worthy of attention by contemporary ethicists and metaethicists. In this chapter, I clarify the argument's structure, methodology, and its key philosophical move, drawing comparisons with Newton's experimental methodology in optics and Raimond Gaita's moral parodies.
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  • Schopenhauer's Rejection of the Moral Ought.Stephen Puryear - 2021 - In Patrick Hassan (ed.), Schopenhauer's Moral Philosophy. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. pp. 12-30.
    More than a century before Anscombe counseled us to jettison concepts such as that of the moral ought, or moral law, Schopenhauer mounted a vigorous attack on such prescriptive moral concepts, particularly as found in Kant. In this chapter I consider the four objections that constitute this attack. According to the first, Kant begs the question by merely assuming that ethics has a prescriptive or legislative-imperative form, when a purely descriptive-explanatory conception such as Schopenhauer’s also presents itself as a possibility. (...)
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  • Schopenhauer on the content of compassion.Colin Marshall - 2020 - Noûs 55 (4):782-799.
    On the traditional reading, Schopenhauer claims that compassion is the recognition of deep metaphysical unity. In this paper, I defend and develop the traditional reading. I begin by addressing three recent criticisms of that reading from Sandra Shapshay: that it fails to accommodate Schopenhauer's restriction to sentient beings, that it cannot explain his moral ranking of egoism over malice, and that Schopenhauer requires some level of distinction to remain in compassion. Against Shapshay, I argue that Schopenhauer does not restrict compassion (...)
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