In this Book
- Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism
- 2019
- Book
- Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

summary
Originally published in 1967. Many critics have claimed that existentialism has not produced any ethics, as distinct from the moralistic assertions of its individual proponents. Challenging this view, Professor Olafson demonstrates that Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty indeed worked out a powerful ethical theory and that their positions must be understood as deriving from a voluntarist concept of moral autonomy that can be traced beyond Nietzsche and Kant to certain tendencies in late-medieval thought. He demonstrates that a broad parallelism exists between developments in ethical theory among Continental philosophers of the phenomenological persuasion and the more analytically inclined philosophers of the English-speaking world.
Table of Contents


- Introduction
- pp. xi-xvii
- Part I: Historical
- pp. 1-2
- Chapter II. Theological Voluntarism
- pp. 19-33
- Part II: Critical
- pp. 105-106
- Chapter VI. Action and Value
- pp. 107-144
- Chapter VII. Freedom and Choice
- pp. 145-187
- Chapter VIII. Authenticity and Obligation
- pp. 189-234
Additional Information
ISBN
9781421430096
Related ISBN(s)
9780801804977, 9781421430942
MARC Record
OCLC
1117490972
Pages
278
Launched on MUSE
2019-09-12
Language
English
Open Access
Yes
Funder
Mellon/NEH / Hopkins Open Publishing: Encore Editions
Creative Commons
CC-BY-NC-ND