Repository | Book | Chapter

In the present chapter we shall sketch the contents of two major German contributions to value-theory, works which not only study the general logic of value-discourse, but which also draw up a comprehensive map of the value-firmament, an ordered setting forth of the different sorts of things that can be held to be good or bad in some cogently valid fashion, and which can arguably be placed in cogently valid relations to one another. These works are Max Scheler's class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">Formalism in Ethics and the Material Value-Ethic, first published in Husserl's Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (Journal for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research) in 1913 and 1914, but not as yet translated into English, and Nicolai Hartmann's Ethics, published in German in 1926, and in an English translation by Stanton Coit in 1932. Both works have a certain sweeping splendour: they consider many questions that Anglo-Saxon moral philosophers never raise (though ordinary Anglo-Saxons often consider them) and they see all these questions in a systematic interrelatedness which is also largely foreign to Anglo-Saxon thought. On the whole they leave one with the impression that, however difficult it may be to lay bare the rationale of value-research, it is none the less something that can be undertaken, and that can be made to yield results neither emptily analytic nor arbitrarily personal.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-00032-6_4

Full citation: