Raymond Geuss

The Birth of Tragedy is one of the seminal philosophical works of the modern period. Nietzsche's discussion of the nature of culture, of the conditions under which it can flourish and of those under which it will decline, his analysis of the sources of discontent with the modern world, his criticism of rationalism and of traditional morality, his aesthetic theories and his conception of the 'Dionysiac' have had a profound influence on the philosophy, literature, music, and politics of the twentieth century. This edition presents a new translation by Ronald Speirs and an introduction by Raymond Geuss that sets the work in its historical and philosophical context. The volume also includes two essays on related topics that Nietzsche wrote during the same period, and that throw further light on the themes treated in the main text.

Outside Ethics brings together some of the most important and provocative works by one of the most creative philosophers writing today. Seeking to expand the scope of contemporary moral and political philosophy, Raymond Geuss here presents essays bound by a shared skepticism about a particular way of thinking about what is important in human life--a way of thinking that, in his view, is characteristic of contemporary Western societies and isolates three broad categories of things as important: subjective individual preferences, knowledge, and restrictions on actions that affect other people. He sets these categories in a wider context and explores various human phenomena--including poetry, art, religion, and certain kinds of history and social criticism--that do not fit easily into these categories. As its title suggests, this book seeks a place outside conventional ethics.Following a brief introduction, Geuss sets out his main concerns with a focus on ethics and politics. He then expands these themes by discussing freedom, virtue, the good life, and happiness. Next he examines Theodor Adorno's views on the relation between suffering and knowledge, the nature of religion, and the role of history in giving us critical distances from existing identities. From here he moves to aesthetic concerns. The volume closes by looking at what it is for a human life to have "gaps"--to be incomplete, radically unsatisfactory, or a failure

Korean civil society is often criticized because of its dual nature, that is, the paucity of social capital in everyday life and the plethora of collective political actions in the national civil society. Although liberals view such duality as the critical impediment to Korea’s authentic (that is, liberal) democratization, which would represent a fundamental, liberal-pluralist transformation of Korean society, this article rather acknowledges its cultural (that is, Confucian) uniqueness and utilizes it as the basis on which to construct a Korean non-liberal democracy that is culturally pertinent and politically viable. First, this article critically re-examines the recent neo-Tocquevillian praise for social capital in light of Tocqueville’s original idea on the art of association, and reveals the liberal-individualistic assumption behind them, with which Confucian-Koreans are culturally unfamiliar. It presents a Korean version of Confucian civil society to promote democratic collective self-government and common citizenship, while rejecting modern Western moral individualism.

This chapter focuses on several ‘post-Kantians’ who were active between roughly the late 1780s and late 1880s, and whose views on ethics are of continuing interest in the early twenty-first century. These include Jacobi, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The era under discussion begins historically with the French Revolution and the initial public assimilation of the Kantian philosophy, and ends when the Second German Empire succeeded in establishing itself and neo-Kantianism was beginning to consolidate its hold on academic philosophy.

Raymond Geuss has been a distinctive contributor to the analysis and evaluation of German philosophy and to recent debates in ethics. In this new collection he treats a variety of topics in ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history with special reference to the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Adorno. Two of the essays in the volume deal with central aspects of the philosophy of Nietzsche. The collection also contains an essay on the history of conceptions of 'culture' and one on the ethics of Ernst Tugendhat. The remaining three essays focus on questions in aesthetics. The volume will be of interest to students of modern philosophy, German intellectual and cultural history, and literary theory.

The paper on Marxism and ethos of the 20th century enters into debate on the moral and political aspects of modern philosophy. Author argues that the most important questions of the 20th century were those concentrated on the Nietzschean philosophy and Marxism. Consequential for his discourse about these phenomena is the discourse analysis of the legacy of Christianity and liberalism. Author fi nds some inspirations in Alasdair MacIntyre’s works, but wants to distance himself from his solutions. Deliberations about failure of European Marxism occupied an important place in creating the notion of the 20th century ethos. Author claims that this main notion of his paper, is direct connected with Marxist triad reflected in „a cycle of need/production/consumption”. His argumentation is based on critical analysis of Aristotelian „division of actions into those performed »for their own sake« and those performed » for the sake of something else«”,which had been adapted to the new discourse on human activity in the context of possibility and necessity of social reforms demanded by both Nietzsche, and Marx. Key words MARXISM

I distinguish three strands in the discussion of "culture" in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. One is centered around the analysis of the diverse folkways of various human groups. A second focuses on the cultivation of individual talents and capacities. The third treats aesthetic experience and judgment and its relation to forms of sociability. I discuss some of the various ways in which these three strands of discussion interacted historically and suggest some ways in which the study of this historical episode might be relevant to contemporary discussions of "culture."