
On Goodness' Attempts To Answer The Question What Is Goodness? It Is Natural To Associate This Question With Ethics; But Goodness Is Not Confined To Ethics. Water And Wine, A Strategy For Streamlining Maintenance Operations, And An Oil Painting May All Be Good And In Non-ethical Ways. Goodness Figures Prominently In Ethics; So The Study Serves Ethics. But It Serves Other Domains As Well. 'on Goodness' Is A Contribution To The Foundations Of Value Theory. It Is Also A Metaphysical Inquiry, For Two Reasons. As The Examples Indicate, The Entity Under Investigation Is Extremely General. Goodness Occurs In Potables, Plans, And Paintings, Among Countless Other Kinds Of Things. Second, It Is Particularly Obscure What Sort Of Being The Entity Is. Besides The Description Good, Is There A Single Thing That Good Drinks, Strategies, And Artworks Share? Is Their Goodness Related In A More Complex Way? And Regardless Of These Relations, In Any Instance, Just What Is That Goodness? The Question What Is Goodness? Has Been Central To Philosophy Since Socrates And Plato Made It Their Polestar. The Distinctive Contribution Of On Goodness Lies In Its Methodology. The Method Of Pursuing The Metaphysical Question Is Linguistic. The Basic Proposal Is That Achieving The Answer Depends On Clarifying The Meaning And Use Of The Words Good And Goodness. Consequently, The Study Is Pervasively Informed By And Critically Engaged With Contemporary Linguistic Theories And Ideas. Ambiguity -- Gradability -- Value -- Dimensional Specification -- Adjectival Nominalization -- Bare Noun Phrases. David Conan Wolfsdorf. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.
This work investigates the fundamental nature of goodness by examining whether a singular definition can encompass the diverse ways the term is applied across ethical and non-ethical domains. David Wolfsdorf, a scholar of ancient philosophy, utilizes a linguistic methodology to analyze the semantic structure of the word 'good' and its nominalized form. By engaging with contemporary linguistic theories, the author argues that clarifying the usage and meaning of these terms is the primary pathway to resolving long-standing metaphysical questions regarding value.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars in the field of analytic philosophy recognize this text as a rigorous application of linguistic analysis to traditional metaphysical problems. Readers frequently note the technical density of the prose, which requires a strong background in semantic theory and philosophy of language.
Page Count:
0
Publication Date:
1900-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press,
ISBN-10:
019068853X
ISBN-13:
9780190688530
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!