Timely Thoughts

Gunnar Skirbekk is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway, and founder of the "Marco Polo" program of comparative studies of cultural modernization in Europe and East Asia, in collaboration with East China Normal University in Shanghai. He earned the Lauritz Meltzer Award for most outstanding research. He is a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and of the Norwegian Academy for the Sciences and the Arts. His books and articles have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Gunnar Skirbekk's work is both original and insightful, combining elements from Anglo-American analytic tradition, Continental European tradition, and especially the work of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the praxeology school as it developed in Germany and Scandinavia. The essays in this volume are both timely and important, addressing themes that are of both theoretical and practical importance. This is certainly true of his essays on ethical gradualism, modernity and a conception of a universal/plural rationality and technological expertise and global ethics. The views Skirbekk articulates in these essays are not only rigorously argued for, but they also offer new insights into urgent problems facing today's global village. They deserve to be read by all who seek a theoretical understanding of our world and a way of dealing with the many practical issues that have led to the kind of fragmentation confronting the world today.

• Part 1 PrefaceChapter 2 IntroductionChapter 3 The Modernity Debate: Rationality—Universal and Plural?Chapter 4 A Crisis in the Humanities?Chapter 5 Technological Expertise and Global EthicsChapter 6 Ethical GradualismChapter 7 On the Possibility of a Philosophical Justification for Universally Binding PrinciplesChapter 8 Procedural Universality, 'Bottom Up'Part 9 BibliographyPart 10 Index