Value in Modernity: The Philosophy of Existential Modernism in Nietzsche, Scheler, Sartre, Musil

by Peter Poellner

Overview

Value in Modernity examines a historical paradigm in ethics that has hitherto not been identified as such: existential modernism. Peter Poellner discusses the central claims of this paradigm through detailed examination of the thought of four of its main exponents: Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Robert Musil. In the case of Nietzsche and Sartre, Poellner offers novel interpretations, reconstructing lines of thought in their work that have usually been neglected. He also offers a new assessment of Scheler's subtle phenomenological version of affective value intuitionism, which is a crucial influence on Sartre's existentialism but has so far enjoyed virtually no reception in an anglophone context. Musil's philosophical novel The Man without Qualities is interpreted as contributing a highly original version of ethical perfectionism to the existential modernist paradigm. While Musil's thought on emotions and moods has begun to receive philosophical recognition in recent years, the significance of the philosophical core of his seminal work has so far not been fully appreciated. In Poellner's interpretation, what we find in the existential modernists is an approach in ethical philosophy that combines a qualified form of affective value intuitionism and a kind of ethical perfectionism. This book reconstructs and defends a version of this approach that integrates elements drawn from each of these thinkers, supplemented by an original elaboration of ideas only implicit in some of them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192849731
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/31/2022
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.50(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Peter Poellner, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick

Peter Poellner studied at Edinburgh and Oxford, obtaining a DPhil in Philosophy at Oxford in 1989. From 1990 to 2020 he taught in the Philosophy Department of Warwick University, from 2009 as Professor of Philosophy. He remains associated with Warwick University as Emeritus Professor (since January 2021). His research interests include philosophy of value, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, history of philosophy (especially Nietzsche, Husserl, Scheler, Sartre, and Musil).

Table of Contents

1. How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche on Overcoming the Tyranny of the Real2. Later Nietzsche: Value, Affect, and Objectivity3. Nietzsche s Evaluative Practice: Ethics and Aesthetics4. The Scheler-Sartre View of Emotion and Value: Defending Qualified Affective Perceptualism5. Indistinctness in Value Experience6. Distorted Value Experience and Intentional Self-Deception7. Freedom, Ethics, and Absolute Value: Early Sartre s Two PhilosophiesAppendix: Beyond Moral Principles8. Modernity, Cultural Discontent, and the Experience of Wholeness: Robert Musil s The Man without QualitiesConclusion

Editorial Reviews

"Philosophy of Existential Modernism is a book whose reading will probably always provoke the contradiction of the reader. But isn't that the point of a good book?" — Alfred Betschart, Sartre Society

"Peter Poellner's Value in Modernity is a subtle, powerfully argued work that straddles the analytic and continental traditions. A lifetime's immersion in the texts under discussion enables Poellner to uncover themes and arguments to which many scholars (myself included) have been entirely blind. Many of the individual discussions are of the highest quality. At times, however, the argumentation is more overpowering than powerful." — Julian Young, Society

From the Publisher