Ebook: The Nature of Value: Axiological Investigations

»During the past forty or fifty years a great deal has been published in moral and political philosophy. During most of this period, however, axiology or the general theory of value has been relatively neglected, and not as much work has been done in this area as was done during the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century by philosophers such as Brentano, Moore, and Ross. In recent years there has beén something of a renewed interest in value theory. Much, however, if not indeed most, of the recent work in this area has not been in the non-naturalist, rationalist, intuitionist, realist tradition of the three thinkers just mentioned. The present work is in that tradition. It seeks to develop and vindicate a view of the irreducibility, rationality, and objectivity of value as an alternative to reductionist, skeptical, relativist, and subjectivist treatments of value. This it does in what may be referred to as a “positive” as opposed to a “negative” way by concentrating mainly on the development of my own views rather than on presenting detailed criticisms of the views of others, and there are few explicit references to and discussions of recent work. [...]«