Peter McCormick Libri

By the Court is the first major study of unanimous and anonymous legal decisions: the unique By the Court format used by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Does the distinctive character of this past century’s tragic endings and this present century’s ominous beginnings raise fresh questions about what is the central subject matter for ethics? Making use of detailed case studies from the twentieth century’s distinctive experiences of warfare and its various echoes in the twentieth century’s poetry, this philosophical study shows that these profoundly unsettling matters freshly challenge ethics today to rethink its central subject. Again, as in the companion volume, When Famine Returns: Ethics, Identity, and the Deep Pathos of Things, the author uses the tentative and indirect resources of the short, classical essay rather than the form of the substantial impersonal monograph. Peter McCormick argues that a cardinal concern for any philosophical ethics today must be the negative sublime, the reflective and responsive consciousness of both the inexorable necessity for and yet the strict incapacity of philosophical understanding alone to articulate rightly the overwhelming magnitudes of human suffering and moral evil.

Blindsight. Absence of visual awareness despite the presence of visual capacity. … Philosophical interest arises because the phenomenon casts doubt on the relation usually assumed between consciousness and perception. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy

There is only one philosophical question: what could doing philosophy ever look like in times like these? Karel Kosík, Prague 1978

After situating the eco-ethical project in the contexts of four major themes in contemporary philosophical reflection in the companion volume published simultaneously, Eco-Ethics and Contemporary Philosophical Reflection, Peter McCormick now suggests a re-articulation and critical appraisal of ecoethics in terms of its two cardinal concepts, the technological conjuncture and ethical innovation. In the second part he then articulates one direction only that further work on the ecoethical project might follow, namely sustained philosophical inquiry into what he has discussed elsewhere in terms of a „negative sublime“ and the deep pathos of famine, the global necessity today for an ethics of suffering. When taken together, both books open perspectives on how contemporary Western philosophical reflection can benefit from broadening its present scope to more active engagements with contemporary East Asian reflection.

This is the first of two volumes dedicated to a sympathetic yet critical articulation of eco-ethics, the project of the distinguished contemporary Japanese philosopher, Tomonobu Imamichi. The basic idea of an eco-ethics is that the now global technological transformation of the human milieu requires radical ethical innovation. In the first of two books published simultaneously, Peter McCormick sets out the major lines of the eco-ethical project in comparison and contrast with outstanding work in contemporary philosophical reflection. He elucidates eco-ethics sympathetically but critically under four headings - moral and ethical realisms, correspondence and coherence accounts of truth, rationalities and aesthetics, interpretation theories and relativisms

Does everyone have a moral obligation to aid famine victims? Or do all persons have more basic ethical responsibility continually to assist such victims substantially, even „beyond the call of moral duty?“ If so, then why? And how? Making use of detailed case studies from the Great Bengal Famines of the 1940s to the recurring Ethiopian famines of the 1970s and 1980s and the Sudanese famines of today, Peter McCormick argues that famine is in part a philosophical issue. In the personal and tentative style of the short, classic reflective essay rather than in the impersonal style of the contemporary extended philosophical monograph, he proposes that „the problem of famine“ cannot be understood as exclusively an economic or political problem. Rather, comprehending famine properly raises at least one quite fundamental ethical issue. For the basic ethical significance of famine is that seriously considering whether and just how one ought continually to assist the numberless victims of famine challenges our previous understandings of what it is both to be a person and to live fully, and rightly, the life of a person.