Thinkers Through Time

Thinkers Through Time: Reading Ethics With Literature takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of ethics. It examines significant moral theories, presenting distinctions, precision, and definitions indispensible to moral judgement. It is organized by the themes of justice, Happiness, morality, intention, person, communication, and transcendence. TTT lets the concrete and sensuous nature of literature give popint and life to philosophy. Part I treats major ethical themes from seven philosophers paired with dramatists, poets, and fiction writers on the same themes: alongside Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant Scheler, Marcel and Levinas are Sophocles, Dante, Ibsen, Percy, Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II), Camus and Endo. Part II takes the same themes and sets them over against selections from Aquinas and Wojtyla, offering a critique. The author's convictions are not imposed on her elucidation of the texts. Instead the philosophers positions are deducible as the chapters unfold and are then put in question by the literary accounts. Brief lives of the philosophers precede the chapters; there are chapter bibliographies and an index.