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    Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
    Unavailable
    Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
    Unavailable
    Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
    Ebook223 pages5 hours

    Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

    By Alain Badiou

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    One of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy explodes the facile assumptions behind the recent ethical turn.

    Ethical questions dominate current political and academic agendas. While government think-tanks ponder the dilemmas of bio-ethics, medical ethics and professional ethics, respect for human rights and reverence for the Other have become matters of broad consensus. Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy, explodes the facile assumptions behind this recent ethical turn. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ideology of the status quo, and fail to provide a framework for an effective understanding of the concept of evil. In contrast, Badiou summons up an “ethic of truths” which is designed both to sustain and inspire a disciplined, subjective adherence to a militant cause (be it political or scientific, artistic or romantic), and to discern a finely demarcated zone of application for the concept of evil. He defends an effectively super-human integrity over the respect for merely human rights, asserts a partisan universality over the negotiation of merely particular interests, and appeals to an “immortal” value beyond the protection of mortal privileges.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVerso
    Release dateJun 10, 2014
    ISBN9781781689936
    Unavailable
    Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
    Author

    Alain Badiou

    Alex Kirstukas has published and presented on Verne's work for both academic and popular audiences and is a trustee of the North American Jules Verne Society as well as the editor of its peer-reviewed publication Extraordinary Voyages. Kirstukas' first published translation was Robur the Conqueror by Jules Verne and published by the Wesleyan University Press in 2017.

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    Reviews for Ethics

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    • 5/5
      Readable, provocative, excellent.
    • 4/5
      Very readable. This book develops themes and ideas from Being and Event (in fact the preface by Badiou explicitly notes some places where he has revised positions advanced in his magnum opus), and is a targeted intervention into current popular and academic discourse on ethics and multiculturalism. Badiou's position is forcefully argued, and he is insightful as ever, but in the course of making his argument he produces numerous strawmen and simplifications; furthermore, while I agree with parts of his criticism of Levinas and the so-called "ethics of the Other" he also is frequently far too glib in his handling of these positions, to the point where one begins to question whether he even understands them. Would have been a five star rating if it weren't for the way that Badiou's polemics occasionally deteriorate into vapid denunciations and hand waving.