Before ethics

Reflecting his interest and concern for the relations among philosophy, spirituality, and faith, Professor Peperzak here shows the way to a postmodern ethics - neither utilitarian nor deontological - by reflecting on its key concepts of freedom, value, intersubjectivity, obligation, responsibility, rights, ethos, history, and culture. He sketches several stepping stones on the way to such an ethics from the first chapter which discusses the situation of ethical philosophy in our time, to the last chapter which shows how a new beginning is possible. The philosophical ethics that he defends is unconventional in that it is critical with regard to the two traditional schools: utilitarianism and deontology. The sources from which Peperzak draws his inspiration are found in Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and French phenomenology, especially Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas.