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This volume presents a series of essays by Sabina Lovibond on moral philosophy, drawing on ideas from Platonic-Aristotelian ethics, the later Wittgenstein, and Iris Murdoch. A common theme is the lived experience of the socially situated subject, and Lovibond considers the role of imaginative literature (especially the novel) in ethical formation.

This volume presents a series of essays by Sabina Lovibond on moral philosophy, drawing on ideas from Platonic-Aristotelian ethics, the later Wittgenstein, and Iris Murdoch. A common theme is the lived experience of the socially situated subject, and Lovibond considers the role of imaginative literature (especially the novel) in ethical formation.

This selection of Lovibond's shorter writings from 1989-2014 has a broad thematic unity based on its affiliation to the realist or rationalist traditions in moral philosophy. Some of the essays seek to clarify the relation of feminism to these traditions and to current anti-rationalist tendencies: especially important here are the status and prospects of normativity, autonomy, purposive action, and other conceptual resources for critical thinking called into question over the last third of the 20th century - not least by feminist writers heedful of 'Continental' European developments.

Lovibond suggests how the "practical reason view of ethics" can survive challenges from within philosophy and from the antirationalist postmodern critique of reason. At the heart of her argument is the Aristotelian idea of the formation of character through upbringing; this idea can be made contemporary if one understands it in a naturalized way.

AbstractThe essay suggests that (despite some hostile twentieth-century criticism) there is such a thing as a characteristically 'aesthetic attitude', and that this idea can indeed shed light on the production and reception of works of art, as well as on the appreciation of nature. It argues, further, that the response to individual 'particularity' implicit in the aesthetic attitude renders this attitude continuous with that of ethical attention to – and appreciation of – individual persons: we are concerned here with distinct, but related, aspects of the valuable 'in itself' or 'for its own sake'.

Some aspects of Wittgenstein's thought are considered in the light of a remark he makes about the "apocalyptic" view of the world. The influence of Tolstoy on Wittgenstein is discussed and elaborated with reference to the idea of a "form of life" as a locus of order, and also to that of "exceptionality" in an unfolding course of events—the latter setting up a connection with the "apocalyptic" theme. This imaginative backdrop remains discernible in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, which draws upon it to perhaps unexpected effect in achieving a dialectical balance between the motifs of order and breakdown.

This article explores the concept of 'gendering', as applied to various traditional fields of enquiry and to ethics in particular. It starts from the idea of a form of criticism that challenges the masculine bias of our inherited models of human nature. But it then argues that if we are to correct this kind of bias and to win back due respect for characteristics hitherto devalued as 'feminine', we shall need some criterion of when these characteristics actually deserve respect and when, instead, they should be seen as artefacts of a hostile sexual power structure. Because such a criterion cannot be provided without some degree of engagement in pre-existing patterns of ethical reasoning, the process of 'gendering' – however radical – turns out to be one that operates on ethics from a position not wholly external but at least partially internal to it. And this is unsurprising in that feminism depends for its motivation on an egalitarian, and hence irredeemably ethical, impulse.

This article will consider a split within current feminist theory which appears to require some declaration of loyalties. This split is not altogether easy to describe in terms of the standard academic classification of feminist positions that prevailed in the 1970s and early 1980s. This schema seems to have been eclipsed over the last ten years or so by a different one which offers feminists a choice between just two basic self-images. Nowadays feminists can be, as before, "liberals" now sometimes designated "liberal-humanists"; or they can be 'radical' in an updated sense, defined by the questioning of certain untenable theoretical assumptions-and so of the authoritarian power structures which these assumptions are held to sustain. The central aim of this paper is to outline, and then to consider the usefulness of, radical, anti-humanist critiques within feminist scholarly writing. This aim is pursued, firstly, by the assembly of some evidence about how an anti- (or, putatively, post-) humanist feminism would differ from its humanist counterpart; and secondly, by the staging of an encounter between anti-humanist theory (thus reconstructed) and the specific political effort summed up in the well-known feminist slogan, "No means no.". 26 References. T. K. Brown

Feminismo y posmodernismo