Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy
- The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy
- Ants and Women, or Philosophy without Borders
- Motifs towards a Poetics
- The Relevance of Cartesianism
- The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy
- The Teleological and Deontological Structures of Action: Aristotle and/or Kant?
- The Crisis of the Post-modern Image
- Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception
- Epistemological History: The Legacy of Bachelard and Canguilhem
- History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault's Approach to History
- Beyond Deconstruction?
- Further Adventures of the Dialectic: Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Althusser
- Paradoxes of the Pineal: From Descartes to Georges Bataille
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
The Teleological and Deontological Structures of Action: Aristotle and/or Kant?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy
- The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy
- Ants and Women, or Philosophy without Borders
- Motifs towards a Poetics
- The Relevance of Cartesianism
- The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy
- The Teleological and Deontological Structures of Action: Aristotle and/or Kant?
- The Crisis of the Post-modern Image
- Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception
- Epistemological History: The Legacy of Bachelard and Canguilhem
- History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault's Approach to History
- Beyond Deconstruction?
- Further Adventures of the Dialectic: Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Althusser
- Paradoxes of the Pineal: From Descartes to Georges Bataille
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
It is usually assumed in moral philosophy that a teleological approach, as exemplified by Aristotle's ethics of virtue, and a deontological approach, as heralded by Kant's ethics of duty, are incompatible; either the good or the right, to designate these two major traditions by their emblematic predicates. My purpose in this paper is to show that a theory of action, broadly understood, may provide the appropriate framework of thought within which justice can be done to both the Aristotelian and Kantian, the teleological and deontological moments of morality.
Instead of action, I will use the term praxis, not only out of reverence for Aristotle, but in order to acknowledge human action's complexity and scope, which tend to be overlooked in the so-called ‘analytic philosophy of action’. A broad account of praxis allows one, to my mind, to assign the two moments of morality to two different stages on the trajectory of praxis, and to establish in this way their complimentarity.
Praxis and the Teleological Moment of Morality
We will proceed in the following way: by considering a series of levels on the scale of praxis, and seeing how far we can go with a quasi-Aristotelian concept of aretè, understood as excellence—in such a way that we will be able to identify the point where a quasi-Kantian model of obligation has to prevail. To anticipate our further discussion, I suggest that it is the consideration of violence that imposes such a conversion in the ethical account of praxis.
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- Contemporary French Philosophy , pp. 99 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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