Anton Leist – författare

In 2003, South African writer J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his riveting portrayals of racial repression, sexual politics, the guises of reason, and the hypocrisy of human beings toward animals and nature. Coetzee was credited with being "a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization." The film of his novel Disgrace, starring John Malkovich, brought his challenging ideas to a new audience. Anton Leist and Peter Singer have assembled an outstanding group of contributors who probe deeply into Coetzee's extensive and extraordinary corpus. They explore his approach to ethical theory and philosophy and pay particular attention to his representation of the human-animal relationship. They also confront Coetzee's depiction of the elementary conditions of life, the origins of morality, the recognition of value in others, the sexual dynamics between men and women, the normality of suppression, and the possibility of equality in postcolonial society.With its wide-ranging consideration of philosophical issues, especially in relation to fiction, this volume stands alone in its extraordinary exchange of ethical and literary inquiry.

Der moralische Kontraktualismus ist neben der kantischen und utilitaristischen Tradition die dritte Haupttradition einer aufgeklärten Moralphilosophie. Seine Kernthese besagt, daß moralische Normen und Forderungen legitim sind, wenn die Betroffenen sich aus ihren Interessen heraus auf die Etablierung dieser Normen hätten einigen können. Eine vernünftige Moral ist demnach, obwohl sie Freiheitsbeschränkungen verlangt, zum gegenseitigen Vorteil der Einzelnen.Die Autoren des Bandes diskutieren im Lichte neuerer Arbeiten die Vorzüge und Schwierigkeiten der moralischen Vertragstheorie. Zentrale Themen sind der Begriff der Moral, das Problem der moralischen Normativität, der Zusammenhang von Moral und Interesse, von Moral und Rationalität sowie die Frage, welche moralischen Normen eine kontraktualistische Theorie konkret zu begründen vermag.

The book illustrates the concept of action in three different contexts - the justification of actions, people's life history, and pragmatism. The special feature of this book is that a comprehensive view of this kind marks a departure from the atomistic approach of action theory, which in itself raises a number of questions. If actions are not justified by mental states, how can persons then act for reasons? How can persons' actions over time be described, and what is the connection with the question of personal identity? If there is to be a unified understanding of the person, does the practical have to take precedence over the theoretical, and what does this mean for epistemology, for example? The ten contributors to this volume engage in an instructive manner with these and similar questions in the three sections of the book.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has grave consequences in several political categories. These include: a reassessment of the school of ‘political realism’, one of whose proponents claims to have predicted the war. Was the West partly ‘responsible’ for the war? Second, to what extent does the war of aggression, as an undeniable violation of law, damage the status of international law and justice? Third, the war is embedded in political developments that stretch back a century. It is examined in its context within American foreign policy since the Wilsonian peace programme, in relation to the dangerous reluctance of the EU to pursue a decisive geopolitical policy towards Russia, and interpreted in the light of Stalinist echoes within Russian politics.