Michael Langford

An Introduction to Western Moral Philosophy 2018: 1 Michael Langford

Designed for an international readership, this new Introduction to Western Moral Philosophy combines an examination of critical thinking (which characterizes Western philosophy) with an account of key philosophers in the tradition that have helped to shape it. In each case, these philosophers are not taken as 'authorities', but as thinkers who have 'laid their fingers' on aspects of the tradition that reveal insight, and that no subsequent philosopher can ignore. The book is based on lectures, given in Canada and Cambridge, at first year university level. In three places it invites the reader to go beyond the introductory level; first, in a discussion of the proper relationship of philosophy to religion (which the author holds has been widely misunderstood); second, in a discussion of the controversial issue of free will (where a particular point of view is defended); third - following an account of the contemporary failure to find any generally acceptable moral philosophy - Professor Langford outlines his own proposal for such a philosophy, based on a dialectic that moves from (i) social rules (in the manner of the English philosopher H. L. A. Hart), (ii) through a kind of 'reflective turn' (characterized by Greek thinking), towards (iii) an 'agape revolution', in which writers such as Martha Nussbaum are prominent.