The Paradox of Obligation: And Other Conceptual Essays in Moral Philosophy
Contents: Preface. 1. On Wittgenstein’s Transcendental Ethics: An Analysis. 2. The Paradox of Obligation. 3. Applying Ethics: Modes, Motives and Levels of Commitment. 4. Man’s Timeless Dialogue with His God: Another Recording. 5. Promising as Obligating Their Fulfilment. 6. Ordinary Language, the Fact of Our Having a Responsibility, Responsibility’s Absolvers, and Ability as Absolvers’ Absence. 7. Formal Logic and the Autonomy of Ethics. 8. On Identifying a Substantive Give and Take between Philosophy and Science. 9. The Gita’s Theory of Action: A Secular–Analytic Assessment. 10. Indian Democracy, Cultural Heritage and Philosophical Progress. 11. Gandhi, Globalization and Quality of Life: A Study in the Ethics of Development. 12. On Priding and Being Proud Of Priding. 13. Logical Rights in the Backdrop of General Human Rights. 14. Aurobindo on Reality as Value. 15. Restoring to Education Its Natural Role of Value-Inculcation: A Modest Proposal. 16. Patriotism Guided by Patriot’s Idea of the Country Concerned. 17. Luck, Desert and the Myth of Moral Luck. Bibliography. Index.
The essays included in this book provide highly critical and creative analysis of some of the basic problems of normative and meta—ethies in a pleasantly readable language. They can be enjoyably and profitably read by technical philosophers as well as interested bymen. Professor Prasad writes on ethical issues as seminal, conceptual issues of moral philosophical, and not as issues arising out of some regional, Indian or non-Indian, instances of moral thinking. Even ethical issues, generally discussed as rooted in classical Indian thinking, have been discussed by him as basic ones of moral philosophising, and thereby he raises the status of some classical Indian views to a level at which their conceptual, general or non-regional, role becomes crystac clear, His writings by to bridge the gulf wrongly created by some others, between Indian and Western moral theorising.
