Books by "Albert William Levi"
4 books found
The modern era was dominated by conflicts between claims to certainty about justice and denials that certainty is warranted. The purpose of this book is to develop a postmodern alternative to both philosophies, one which is universal without being absolutist. The approach is dialectical in Plato's sense of that term. Dialectic is both necessary and sufficient for the theoretical and the practical aspects of living. The primary symbol in this book is the Athenian Socrates who spent his days in the Agora and his evenings in the houses of his friends, the active professionals of the world's first democracy. His questions were unabashedly philosophical, concerned with the most urgent matters. What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? Who is best suited to rule in the state? How should young people be educated? The nature of justice is closely connected with other questions of value, so the discussion freely moves from that central focus to related matters with the primary goal of developing a dialectical philosophy that is both applicable to life and open to all. Universal Justice is concerned with how to think about justice rather than what to think about justice.
The High Road of Humanity is a cultural ethics. It is an exposition of the moral positions of the West, intended to accompany the intellectual positions of Western philosophy and society formulated in Levi's earlier Philosophy as Social Expression. In opposition to the nearly complete abstraction from actual moral life that is the common stance of the works in ethics in our time from positivism to applied ethics, Levi's aim is to take the process of moral thought back one step further from moral inquiry to its basis in the moral imagination. For Levi the moral life and moral discourse requires first of all an ideal that is shaped in the imagination, an image of the human. The seven ethical ages he discusses are the Greek aristocrat, Stoic sage, Christian saint, Renaissance prince, Enlightenment gentleman, the nineteenth-century merchant prince, and the professional man and women of today. He gathered the details of each historical figure or moral ideal and selected sculpture, paintings, and portraits to illustrate them. Levi's approach to moral philosophy is based on his lifelong study in the philosophy of culture. The foreword is by Donald Phillip Verene.