
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.
This work investigates the fundamental nature of goodness by questioning whether a singular, unified entity exists across diverse domains of application. David Conan Wolfsdorf, a scholar of ancient philosophy, utilizes a linguistic methodology to examine the meaning and usage of the term "good." He argues that by clarifying the semantic properties of the word, one can resolve long-standing metaphysical ambiguities regarding value across ethical and non-ethical contexts.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars and students of philosophy identify this text as a rigorous contribution to contemporary value theory. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which requires a strong background in analytic philosophy to fully navigate the author's linguistic arguments.
Page Count:
328
Publication Date:
2019-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0190688521
ISBN-13:
9780190688523
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